Web Analytics Wizard

Knowing how people get to your website is a fundamental factor in fine-tuning your online presence. It can do wonders when it comes to squeezing more out of your advertising budget or becoming more educated about the tendencies of your users. Fortunately for you, any web analytics tool worth its salt will have a breakdown of all the sources of traffic that lands on your site. So now that you that you know, let’s cover the basics.

If you are using Google Analytics, you’ll see Traffic Sources in the left hand column – click on it and select sources.

First you will see “Direct Traffic”. Any visitor that falls under direct traffic typed in your URL in directly. They didn’t find you through any kind of search or third party site. This can indicate the effectiveness of your offline marketing or word of mouth referrals.

Option 2 is Referring Sites. These visits come from any link to your site on another site. This can include blogs, partner sites, banner ads or directory listings. These visits can tell you a lot about what other interests your visitors have and how popular you site is across the web. If you are seeing a high volume of referring sites, that means you have links across all of them, which is a very positive thing.

Your third source is Search Engines. This is pretty self explanatory. It let’s you know which search engines people are coming from. This includes paid listings along with the organic ones.

There are some subtleties to analytics that are worth knowing, but that is the meat and potatoes. One important thing to look for is the percentage of visitors coming from direct traffic as opposed to search engine traffic. Since 80% of web traffic comes from search engines, you know that you need to focus on your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) if you see the majority coming from direct traffic. That will tell you people aren’t finding you by your keywords and you’re missing out on a lot of very valuable (and cheap) organic traffic.

Did this wet your appetite for web analytics? Visit www.seevolution.com to find the best advice on Web Analytics.