Diary of a Website: Discovering Your Traffic Sources

We're continuing with our series of posts for people with new websites, or who are generally new to Google Analytics. Yesterday, we saw how to get in to look at the data, and had a look at the Site Usage section of the dashboard. It's good to have a look at that information on a regular basis.

The other part of the dashboard that you ought to get familiar with right away is the Traffic Sources section. You can click on the words "Traffic Sources" in the navigation in the upper left of your dashboard, or on the pie chart in the main section of the dashboard, which looks like this:





I wrote a post on the basics of traffic sources a few months back, so I won't repeat it, but I recommend that you click on that link and read it if you're new to Analytics. Essentially, the Traffic Sources section of your dashboard tells you how people found your website.

The pie chart example above is an established site with a nice amount of traffic. Myra Grayson, who has so kindly allowed us to keep a diary of her new website's progress, doesn't yet have that kind of traffic, and she has a different proportion of sources, too:



The established site has about half of its traffic from search engines, a bit more than a third from direct traffic, and much less from referring sites. Myra's website gets two-thirds of its visits from referring sites, and only a little bit from search engines.

The best balance of sources depends on your business, your goals, and a number of other factors. However, the fact that Myra gets very little search traffic so far shows that the search engines need to be alerted to her existence. We're currently doing a basic linkbuilding campaign for Myra's new site, so we'll expect to see the proportion of visitors from search increase. Visits from direct traffic may increase, too, though for a variety of reasons that might not be a major traffic source for Myra's site.

Let's have a look at her top referring sites:

• graysllandacres.blogspot.com (referral) 21.88%
• facebook.com (referral) 17.97%
• rebeccahaden.com (referral) 10.94%
• art.uark.edu (referral) 6.25%

Myra has 16 different referring sites right now (that number will increase as she gains more links), and four have sent her multiple visitors. Google Analytics tells how many visitors have come from each source, and what percentage that is of the traffic -- in this case, of the total traffic, but you can also see what proportion a given site provides of your referred traffic.

We can see that 21.88% of Myra's visitors are coming in from her blog -- a good blog is a good source of traffic, so we're glad to see that. She has people coming in from her Facebook page, too. It's likely that social media will be a good choice for her site. Even though the amount of data we have right now is small, Myra can already get some sense of what strategies she might choose to pursue to increase her traffic in the future.

She also has people coming from my website and from the designer's website -- those are the other two domains listed as referring sources above. Those people probably aren't customers for Myra. It doesn't hurt to have those visitors, but the fact that they send traffic doesn't mean Myra should try to get more links like those.

As she gets more visitors and more data, Myra will be able to use the information from Google Analytics to make decisions about her website, her marketing strategy, and even about her business.

Labels: Google Analytics