It’s only natural to want to know the people who are visiting your website (or blog, landing page, etc.). While social sites like Facebook can provide detailed demographic information about fans and followers, visitors to websites can’t be pinpointed so easily. However, learning how they landed on your website can be measured using traffic source metrics. In Google Analytics, it looks like this:
This segment of visitors arrived at the website via organic (non-paid) web search. Drilling down into this section will show the top keywords used in the search. Note: if you have paid search marketing running, this will show up under a different section, but the information will be similar. Google Analytics shows keywords like this:
In this particular case, the top performing keywords are not provided (this happens when a visitor is signed into a Google account). The second best performing keywords are “Greenville College” which account for 28.51% of the search traffic. Each keyword can be drilled down further to see bounce rate, time on page, etc. to determine the overall performance.
Here, I drill down the #3 ranking keywords "Greenville College Athletics":
In the case of Greenville College (my employer), the "Greenville College Athletics" keywords accounted for 1.59% of visits, and had a bounce rate of 16.25%. I can deduce that visitors searching for Greenville College Athletics wanted an update on scores for a game or to read a story about a recent win or athlete. These visitors will spend several clicks locating the information they are looking for, and several minutes reading the information. If the bounce rate goes up over time, I would visit the page to determine the cause of the bounce.
Here, I drill down the #3 ranking keywords "Greenville College Athletics":
In the case of Greenville College (my employer), the "Greenville College Athletics" keywords accounted for 1.59% of visits, and had a bounce rate of 16.25%. I can deduce that visitors searching for Greenville College Athletics wanted an update on scores for a game or to read a story about a recent win or athlete. These visitors will spend several clicks locating the information they are looking for, and several minutes reading the information. If the bounce rate goes up over time, I would visit the page to determine the cause of the bounce.
Referral Traffic
Like before, drilling down into this section will show the top 10 referring pages. Many times the top referring pages and sites will not surprise you, but on occasion there will be an unexpected listing.
The screenshot above reveals that Facebook is the top referring page for Greenville College. This is great news for Facebook and indicates that it is an area where we need to continue to spend time and money. The other referring sites are predominantly organizations where Greenville College has been cross-promoted via conferences and partnerships. Google.com comes in at #4. This could be an indicator of good, or poor, SEO performance (Kaushik, 2010, P. 86).
There may be times when a source is listed that you are unfamiliar with. It is worth the time to investigate. Depending on your business and the nature of your website, this list can provide information you can use to leverage key relationships. If a blog is generating a lot of traffic, perhaps there are ways you can continue the relationship with the blogger to create a brand advocate. A brand advocate is a user or customer who tells their friends about your brand – for free. Cultivating these relationships is priceless. For more information about brand advocates, check out this article from Phil Mershon (2011).
Like in the search traffic section, each source can be drilled down to see bounce rate, time on site, pages per visit, etc. Some sources will have a high bounce rate, others will be low. The ones with lower bounce rates are the more effective sources. Visitors from these sources are engaging longer with your brand. Try to determine why they are so effective and if there are ways to increase traffic from these sources. It will be worth the effort.
Direct Traffic
This metric shows the percentage of visitors who arrived at the site directly – by typing in the URL, using a bookmark, or clicking on a link in an email, text or chat message. These visitors are already familiar with you, are usually returning visitors, and are most often your current customers (Kaushik, 2010, P. 86). This can be a good indicator of the strength of your brand or effectiveness of an email campaign (Roggio, 2011). Drilling down into the direct traffic will show the top landing pages on your site. Often times the homepage will be at the top, but not always. If an email campaign is running that includes a link to a specific page, that page could be a top performer. Or, if a virtual link is set up for advertising purposes, that page could be in the top three. If any of the top 10 pages are a surprise, it is worth some investigation to determine why users are landing on that page, and if it is generating a high bounce rate, etc.
References:
Kaushik, A. (2010). Web analytics 2.0: The art of online accountability & science of customer centricity. Indianapolis, IN: Wiley Publishing, Inc.
Mershon, P. (2011, June 13). 9 Reasons your company should use brand advocates: New research. Social Media Examiner. Retrieved from http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/9-reasons-your-company-should-use-brand-advocates-new-research/
Roggio, A. (2011, July 18). Understanding ‘Traffic Sources’ in Google Analytics. Practical ecommerce. Retrieved from http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/2916-Understanding-Traffic-Sources-in-Google-Analytics
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