Jan
17
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Understand Traffic Sources from Google Analytics

Author Toma    Category Google Analytics, Organic SEO Techniques, SEO Tips     Tags


google-analytics-understand-traffic-sourcesGoogle Analytics shows you reports about 3 kinds of traffic: direct, referral and search engine. It’s important to understand how to look at these reports and how to spot problems.

Direct traffic comes from people that type your website address directly in the browser or click on a bookmark.

Referral traffic is traffic send from other websites. This means that you have a link on another website, or you post a link or an article on another website.

Search engine traffic is traffic that your website receives from search engines. Here you can see the non-paid traffic or paid traffic. If you pay for a service like AdWords knowing what paid keywords sent you traffic and what was the bounce rate could be useful.

For paid keywords you can evaluate the landing page relevancy for that keyword by analyzing the bounce rate. If the bounce rate is high you should ask yourself if it’s worth paying for those keywords or you should work some more on the landing page to increase the relevancy towards that keyword.

You can also look at All Traffic Sources to see what kind of source send you most of the traffic. In the table you’ll see the source of the traffic followed by its type: /referral, /direct, /email or /organic (traffic from organic rankings on search engines). Looking at all the traffic is a good method to rapidly spot the big areas that need improvement.

While looking to the All Traffic Sources, you’ll see in the right-up corner of the table few visualization options, Views. Choose the forth icon from the left that says Comparison. For all traffic sources you’ll see now its performance compared to the sites average.

This way you can see what traffic source helps your site average performance or its pulling you down. You have different options like Visits, Pages/Visits, Bounce Rate, Avg. Time on Site and % New Visits.

NOTE: If your website is a blog then a high Bounce Rate can be normal. You can improve it by writing more articles on the subject and link between content in a natural and logical way.

When you look at the Keyword report an interesting option to View the table is Pivot (right-up corner of the table). For each keyword you’ll see how many visits you received and from what search engine. With this viewing option active you can select to see Visits and Bounce rate and you can see the bounce rate from each search engine, for every keyword. For example I have a keyword that send me traffic with 100% bounce rate from Google and 0% bounce rate from Bing.

Let me know what you think about this article. Share your ideas and thoughts in comments bellow and if you find it useful please consider subscribing to this blog and receive my content directly in your e-mail.

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14 Comments to “Understand Traffic Sources from Google Analytics”

  • Jennifer Deal January 18, 2010 at 10:24 pm

    Thanks for posting this. Thanks for pointing out the keywords report. Is there also a way to follow how a visitor navigated your site. For example, do 90% come to the home page and then go to contact OR if we have specific landing page, where the user went next? This would also be helpful information for the analytic beginners (like myself).

    Reply
    • Toma January 19, 2010 at 9:03 am

      Hi Jennifer,

      Good question. I’ll write an article on this topic but to offer you an answer right now here is how you do it.

      Go To Content and click either Content by Title or Top Landing Pages (whatever helps you find the page you want faster). Then click on the page link displayed in the table report. The next screen will contain in the right a link called Navigation Summary. That will show you where users went from that page.

      While on that page you can also click on Site Overlay: this will open a new window with your website but with a click map on top of it that will show you what clicks were performed while on that page.

      Hope you find my answer useful. I’ll write a more detailed article on this subject so come back to the blog or consider subscribing.

      Thanks!

      Reply
  • GreenDriv January 19, 2010 at 11:41 am

    Thanks for your article.

    Can you write more about google analytics? More details about that tool?

    Reply
    • Toma January 19, 2010 at 11:51 am

      Thank you for your comment. I’ll keep it in mind and continue writing about Google Analytics.

      Reply
      • GreenDriv January 19, 2010 at 11:55 am

        If convenient, can you kindly send us your articles about google analytics to our email? :-) Have a good day!

        Reply
  • Kate January 19, 2010 at 12:31 pm

    Hi, thanks for this and more on Google Analytics would be appreciated! I’m fairly new to this – in your opinion what constitutes a ‘high bounce rate’ for a website?

    Reply
  • Do You Know What The User Clicked On Your Website? January 19, 2010 at 3:05 pm

    [...] Keywords. Knowing what keywords sent traffic to that page can be extremely useful. Especially because many times a page might receive traffic [...]

    Reply
  • Chuck Bartok January 24, 2010 at 7:54 pm

    I appreciate your Information.
    This may be a bit off topic.
    I stumbled across a tool in GOOGLE one day,
    that showed related Keywords out like spokes on a wheel and then you cgo out form there.
    I can’t remember How I got there.
    I found it very helpful.
    Do you know how to get there?

    Appreciate your help

    Reply
    • Toma January 25, 2010 at 12:42 pm

      Do a Google Search. On the top left corner you’ll see a link Show Options. Click on it. On left side of the screen will appear a panel with links. Select Wonder Wheel.

      Reply
  • Beverly February 17, 2010 at 5:36 pm

    Thank you for your google analytics article. I am just beginning to work with the customized reports so your articles are really helpful. What do you suggest for a report that basically shows the performance of a web site. (metrics…dimensions). Look forward to future articles. Thank you!

    Reply
    • Toma February 18, 2010 at 10:49 am

      Thank you for your comment Beverly. It’s difficult to measure all in one custom report. Before you build a custom report you should ask yourself what do you want to find. If I can help you by writing an article about some issue let me know.

      Reply
  • Peter Westerner March 23, 2010 at 3:59 am

    @ Jennifer and Toma

    Good article, with regards to seeing what your users did on your site you could take the time to set up Goals. For a smaller site this will be easy.

    Ex1. Visitor comes to home page, then about then contact us

    you could set up a funnel under a Goal for those 3 things…

    There should be an easier way though…

    Reply

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