Google Analytics: Where Is Your Traffic Coming From?

When analyzing your website in any tool, one of the most important sets of data focuses on where your traffic is coming from. It’s broken down into 3 different categories, and you should be looking closely at the advanced details for each of them.

Referral Traffic

Remember when link-building was purely an SEO strategy? How silly, because some of your best traffic comes from those backlinks on referring websites.

In fact, that is the reason you want to be sure that your links are all high quality. They should be published naturally. In the right context. They should only be published on relevant websites, meaning authority sites that cater to the same audience you want to reach.

If you can build your own links, great.

If other sites are linking to you all on their own, even better! The bottom line isn’t the links themselves though… it’s the traffic that comes from those links. Ideally, you want to know which websites are sending new customers—not “adding to your Google PR”.

Direct Traffic

This section focuses on the percentage of website visitors who went directly to your website by entering your address in their browser. It’s really simple, and it tells you how many visitors already knew about your brand. This is good, and you can always increase direct traffic by raising brand awareness to a targeted audience. That’s the easy part.

You can’t look much deeper into this element other than gaining insight into the percentage of your website visitors all together who already know about you.

Search Traffic

Finally, this section is where you can further assess and understand the impact that your search engine optimization efforts have been making. You can find out which keywords bring new customers, and that’s far more important than knowing which keywords you think you want to rank on the front page of Google for.

With some clarification, the traffic sources section in your Google Analytics dashboard can tell you what you need to know to improve your internet marketing strategy. The end goal isn’t just to get more traffic though… it’s to reach more qualified traffic so pay attention to the conversion data as well.