Last modified on July 27, 2021
Understanding your website traffic is an essential step in knowing which acquisition channels to optimize. Indeed, not all of your web marketing levers have the same impact on your site traffic.
Measuring the different sources of traffic after installing Google Analytics is therefore often necessary to identify new areas for improvement.
The different acquisition channels on Google Analytics
In Google Analytics reports, you can distinguish up to 8 different traffic sources. However, you should know that you will not see the sources where you have no traffic in your dashboard. Here are the acquisition channels to know:
Organic traffic
Organic traffic corresponds to visits coming from search engine like Google or Bing. It should be noted that this source only takes into account the traffic from organic results and not Adword sponsored links which are in a separate category.
It is important to know that organic traffic obtained through natural referencing is a significant lever to consider in order to generate a significant number of visitors and make your site profitable. To do this, it is essential to know which keywords to position yourself on in order to create suitable content that meets Internet users’ requests.
However, you will quickly realize that when you want to get more details on organic traffic, Google Analytics confuses the issue by stating “not provided” on the main queries. Fortunately, Google Search Console and other tools allow you to get more data.
Direct traffic
Direct traffic is one of the most common sources of visits to your site. As the name suggests, it is defined by the visitors who come directly to your sitefor example by manually entering the website URL or coming directly from the favorites.
This traffic data should be taken with a grain of salt because in many cases it comes from internal employees, partners or current customers who go through your site to log in to their account. But it can also be indicative of excellent brand awareness if users come to your site spontaneously.
Traffic referral
Referral traffic is used to describe visitors to your site who come from links from other sites other than search engines and social networks.
For example, other sites that consider your content to be a credible source may link to your site. But these links could also be links from blog comments, forums, or directories.
Also called backlinks In SEO jargon, these links play a significant role in Google rankings. A link obtained from a high authority and contextualized site will have much more weight and value than a simple comment or forum link.
This is of course the traffic obtained from social networks. Previously this traffic was not distinguished from referral traffic on Google Analytics. Since this is a big source of traffic for many publishers, Google has made this possible.
Google Analytics therefore allows you to see where visitors come from from Twitter, Facebook, Google+ or other social networking sites. The ROI of this channel is often controversial, the advantage with Google Analytics is that you can set goals, measure conversion and compare with other acquisition channels.
Paid traffic
In the Google Analytics dashboard, Paid traffic usually appears as “cpc” or “ppc”. This data will only appear if you have launched Adwords campaigns on Google and is dissociated from organic traffic. These figures are only traffic indicators and do not replace Google Adwords for the return on investment performance of your campaigns.
Paid traffic also includes the display network if you have opted for this option in ad targeting.
Mail traffic
Finally, email traffic obviously concerns visits to your site coming from your e-mailing campaigns and your newsletters. This type of traffic, often very qualified if it is your own contact base, is not to be neglected. This is why it is necessary to follow the data of this channel in order to measure the impact of your campaigns.
Analyze traffic sources.
Traffic sources allow you to understand where visitors come from, but it is also important to know how to analyze their journeys in order to improve your marketing strategy.
First, look at which channels bring the most traffic to your site in order to focus your efforts. For example, if you use Facebook and Google SEO to promote your e-commerce site, you can compare which channel brings the most traffic in quantity.
However, this is not always enough because the most important thing is to look at which channel brings the most conversions, especially for online sales sites. From there, it is necessary to configure your Google Analytics dashboard by recording objectives. This could be the purchase of a product, reservations, the creation of an account, a download, a subscription to a newsletter, etc.
To do this, you must go to Administration > Objectives > New Objective. Once this is done, you need to regularly monitor these numbers in the funnel by going to Conversions > Goals > Funnel Visualization.
Conclusion
Data from Google Analytics is ultimately an excellent way to measure the performance of your website in order to have leads on the traffic acquisition levers to explore. However, it should be kept in mind that organic and social traffic will always be preferred to generate the most visitors. Direct traffic, often synonymous with excellent notoriety, will only be a reflection of all the work accomplished.
Passionate about the web and entrepreneurship, I founded Digitiz in 2016. My goal is to share my experience with you and save you time in choosing your tools.
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