Reviewing analytics data is essential for discovering the next steps for marketing your business online. The review can save time and money deciding on site redesign decisions and how your business markets itself online. Yet sometimes understanding meaningful data beyond website “hits” is not instantly clear.
If you find your analysis is not clear, try reviewing the traffic sources report for initial ideas. Monitoring traffic sources can benefit your overall business by measuring how well your exposure online is doing, and which could be strengthened. To get started, take a look at each traffic source, and its potential value to your business decisions.
Direct Traffic represents the visitors who arrived to your site directly, either by typing the URL or by bookmarking the site. Consider this data as the health of your site “brand” – someone saw the URL and decided to act.
What is the Value to My Business: Direct traffic visitors are typically the visitors most interested in your site, because they saw your URL and chose to visit your site rather than clicking a link or an ad. If someone typed Zimana.com, their interest in typing the URL means they were interested in learning more about the site.
To gain a better sense of where your interested visitors are, filter other reports with only direct traffic, such as examining direct traffic in the geolocation report. Combinations can reveal where to tailor your marketing towards the most interested clients or customers. So if you are consistently seeing traffic from Indiana and your business is based in Chicago, chances are your Indiana traffic is seeing the URL somewhere – from trade show appearances to ads – and choosing to directly view the site.
You can also review content pages filter through direct traffic to discern which are attracting direct visitors. You can then decide how to augment that content – from related articles to sales campaign for a product.
Referral Traffic Report in analytics allows you to compare online sources
Referral Traffic are visits from sites linked to your website. Let’s say, for example, your business team regularly participates in forums on Linked In or have posted images related to your blog in Pinterest. The traffic source reports would reflect traffic that arrives from these sites.
What Is The Value to My Business: If your marketing includes online community participation, posting articles on a partner site, or using social media, referral traffic reports will reveal the amount of traffic coming from those sites. Doing so helps to understand the return on your involvement, be it your time or membership fee. leads into online customers or sales leads for your own website.
Search Traffic is, of course, the traffic arrivals via search engines. The basic report can be helpful if you are trying to decide which search engine may need more exposure. A paid search campaign would be one idea.
What Is The Value To My Business: The value is helping to decide which search terms are working organically for your site. You can build on top of the content development or decide which words would be better served through paid search ads. You can also compare branded terms – words that contain your brand – against non-branded terms. For example, for an automotive brand like Chevrolet, the nickname “Chevy” and vehicles such as “Impala”, “Cruze”, “Malibu”, “Camaro” and “Corvette” would be branded terms. Generic nouns
Every website has a different mix of traffic sources – a blog with a consistent posting schedule will probably generate more search than a B2B site. Ultimately your business should weigh its marketing effort against each source, and see the metrics each source contributes. Traffic from search may have higher engagement metric (average time on site and pageviews) that the time spent in online communities generating traffic. And you’ll begin to see which efforts are working for you.
