Ideas for educating users into typing url in address bar instead of google

Question

My Google analytics shows the second most used keyword to access my site is the url of the site. This doesn't particularly surprise me, but I wondered if any of you have tried educating your users out of this (i.e. detecting search term from referrer and showing a popin encouraging them to create bookmarks etc.) or is it just a waste of effort or likely to annoy.

UPDATE

I was watching someone the other day and discovered one possible reason why people do this. If you try clicking in the address bar and click twice instead of once, then type your url, you get a big mess. Far easier to type into the nice empty google search box (which is also selected by default). So basically you have the choice between:

Type > Enter > Click

or

BadClick > Type > Enter > "Bugger!" > Click > Type > Enter

Answer 1

for most people, google is the internet.

Focus your efforts somewhere else, like providing good contents. It does not matter how they get there.

Answer 2

I'm not sure anything can be done. Users are known to be extremely stubborn in their habits.

One my fellow googles for the login page of his online-banking system, being too lazy to type it in or bookmark it. That scares me a lot. It only takes for someone to manipulate search results even for a day or so to hijack the credentials.

I suggest you ignore the matter. With luck, if they google enough for your site, then google will start to show the name of your site in suggestions as your type which is rather nice.

Answer 3

Good luck :) Most of internet users may even not realize if the address bar gets removed from their browser. Typing a URL is far too technical.

Answer 4

Similarly, Microsoft noted long ago that many people just type search queries into the address bar. If there are essentially between two and four unlabeled text boxes on a browser window (address bar, search box, maybe Google start page, toolbars, etc.) don't expect the user to find the right one when they should.

As long as they end up where they wanted to they couldn't care less.

Google Chrome did the right thing imho by merging at least the search and the address bar again.

Answer 5

I've tried to encourage the use of a browser at work to access the data I put on the company intranet. It's proving difficult — they would much rather open My Computer and drill down through many levels of folders, while muttering 'Where was that file? What was it called again?'

I prefer the idea of web pages on an intranet site, with images, hyperlinks, etc, but I have to be careful not to use the term 'browser' since people don't really know what it means. For example, I demonstrated the site to one colleague by telling her to start 'Internet Explorer', then I typed the URL, rather than explain it to her. When the web page opened, she said 'Oh wow, what program is this?'

I've gone to some trouble to use 'friendly URLs' — no complex query strings, but it was probably a waste of time. I'm sure no-one types them in and uses bookmarks/favorites instead.

If the address bar disappeared, it wouldn't be missed by the majority of Internet users, and there's a Google/Yahoo/whatever search tool in the corner of each page.