In any business, understanding how your customers find you is very important. It’s no less important in the on-line world. Though your visitors may “find” you in different ways, learning how they do will help you drive traffic to your site later on. The Traffic Sources section of Google Analytic’s reports will help you do that. Here’s a break down of the main sections:
- Direct Traffic
- The measure of how many visitors get to your site without click on a link on another web page.
- The visits could result from people typing the address of your site directly into the address bar of their browsers or clicking on the link in their browser’s “Favorites” or “Bookmarks.”
- This gives you a good sense of repeat visitors.
- Referring Sites
- This is a list of sites visitors were on when they clicked over to your site.
- If you are considering advertising, this is an important list to review to learn where your advertising money can be better spent.
- If you are already advertising, this list can show you which sites are giving you the most return on your investment.
- Search Engines
- This is a list of visitors who came to your site via a search.
- If you’re doing search engine optimization (SEO), this can give you a very general indication how those efforts are going. (Keywords will give more detail, see below).
- All Traffic Sources
- This is the overall list of where your traffic is coming from.
- It’s an aggregate of the above three reports
- I think it should be first in the list of Traffic Sources because it’s a very nice summary.
- AdWords
- This area with its subsections are measurements of your traffic based on AdWords advertising campaigns.
- I’ll skip this section because it’s a whole other subject unto itself.
- Keywords
- This is a list of visits based on actual words and phrases visitors used for searches which led them to your site.
- This section can give you excellent indication of your SEO results as well as help you in key word research for future SEO efforts
- Campaigns and Ad Versions
- These sections are used in conjunction with advertising
- Advertising is a whole other subject, so I’ll skip these two sections as I did the AdWords section.
These reports are easy to understand and “down and dirty” and can give you some fantastic insight as to where your visitors are coming from and how they found you. If you are doing any kind of SEO efforts, be it key word research or optimizing your content, I highly recommend drilling into the Keywords section. There is a gold mine of information in there which can greatly enhance your efforts.
Please feel free to comment any questions you may have.
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