What are Traffic Sources? Google Analytics For Beginners
Last week, I talked about the differences between Google Analytics visits, visitors, and page views. Today, I’d like to discuss how you can use Google Analytics to determine your website’s traffic sources.
Starting with the dashboard view of your Google Analytics account, you’re going to want to look for this Traffic Sources Overview graph:
Where website visitors come from according to analytics.
Click view report to get started.
The traffic sources report view in Google Analytics
This view can show us quite a bit, starting with:
- The number of people that visited the site as the result of an internet search. As you can see from the report, more than half of the people who find our website do so via Google.
- The number of direct visits, or people that navigated directly to our site (more on that below).
- The number of people referred to us from different websites along with the names of the referring sites.
- Any ‘other’ traffic sources. Typically these represent specially coded inbound links.
Once you’ve reviewed the overview page, you can click on each category name to learn more about each specific traffic source.
Search Engine Traffic: The goal of search engine optimization (SEO) is to get as many visits from search engines as possible. Visits from search engines represent ‘free’ traffic that is visiting our site to find the answer to a specific question. The hope is that some of these search engine visitors will contact us about marketing services. If this ‘free’ traffic from the search engines results in new business, it’s easy to see the value of SEO: free visits from search engines can result in new business.
A Note About the ‘Search Engine Traffic’ category: Thanks to a blog post from James Royal-Lawson, I’ve learned that Google’s ‘search engine traffic’ category is a little misleading. You can read up on the technical aspects of Google source attribution here. Be warned: the explanation is somewhat technical, and for many website owners the final numbers won’t be much different. Still, it’s interesting stuff.
Direct Traffic: Direct visits come in a few different forms. Some people might have bookmarked a page on our website that they found interesting or useful and decided to return to our site later using that bookmark. This would be a considered a ‘direct’ visit. Someone who typed our URL SporkMarketing.com into the title bar of their browser would also be a direct visit. It’s important to note that direct visits can be stimulated by advertisements. If someone views one of our YouTube videos and then types SporkMarketing.com into their browser, that’s a direct visit…but it might have been triggered by an advertisement.
Referred Visitors: If someone on another website clicks on a link pointing to our website, that is often counted as a referral. I say ‘often’ because this isn’t 100% fool-proof tracking…but it’s usually very good.
Other Visitors: Other visits represent specially ‘tagged’ links that we’ve deployed. We’ll explore this later, but it’s possible to tag a link with a special code so we can track specific visits from that link.
There are many other possible sources of traffic that fall under the refferal category. Other common traffic sources include:
- Google image search: There is a substantial volume of image searches on Google. If your images are tagged and the files are named in a descriptive manner, you will see a fair amount of visits from Google’s image search engine.
- Web directory listings: Depending on the type of business you have, you may find that consumer directories (i.e. YellowPages.com, Yelp.com, etc.) result in a substantial number of visitors.
- Social networks: Twitter, Facebook, and social bookmarking sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, and Reddit can send substantial amounts of traffic to your site if you use them correctly.
Anyone with anything to add? Questions?
Comments
tacogirl Mar 31st, 2010
Thanks for answering my question about the Other category. Very useful info.
Laura Apr 24th, 2010
Hi, thanks for sharing. It is really confusing when I see google’s spiders crawling my sites appearing as hits. How can you easliy tell which hits are gvisitors’ hits and which ones are bots, other than tracking your links?
LAura
admin Apr 26th, 2010
Laura – My understanding is that Google automatically removes bots from their analytics reports. Unless a bot is unknown to Google, it’s probably not in your numbers. My other thought: I can’t imagine that bots would account for a significant volume. Do you have any reason to suspect bots are visiting your site and impacting your stats?
Nas Jul 26th, 2011
hi
What is the differance between other and referring site?
Thank you
Best Wishes
Nas
admin Jul 26th, 2011
Nas – You should only see “other” traffic sources if you have tagged an incoming link with a source that Google analytics doesn’t identify, i.e. it’s not tagged ‘organic,’ ‘ppc,’ etc.
rajee Oct 27th, 2011
Can you please let me know whether my blog traffic source is good or bad?
Referring Sites
6,236.00 (47.29%)
Search Engines
3,735.00 (28.33%)
Direct Traffic
1,756.00 (13.32%)
Other
1,459 (11.06%)
Thanks
Rajee
admin Oct 27th, 2011
rajee – To me, the percentage of referral traffic is very high and that’s usually a good thing. However, the true measurement of traffic quality is to look at other metrics. Do those people who visit your site stay a while? Do they look at more than one page? Do they leave comments? etc. Those are the best ways to measure the quality of traffic.
Kashif Nov 28th, 2011
Can you please help me with my case. I observed that two sites A & B are referring to my website.
But when I put the URL of “Site A” into my browser, it always redirects to “Site B” and “Site B” has links to my site.
I am confused that why I am seeing “Site A” in my referring sites? How does Google Analytics track the referring site? Seems like, it does not use referrer header.
justin Feb 16th, 2012
We recently launched a web app and the first two days we saw ~4000 direct hits and ~400 refferals. I have serious doubts that 4000 people typed the url directly into the browser. Also it looks like the majority of the direct hits only landed on on the home page and didnt get any further. Im very curious as to what could have caused this type of traffic.
admin Feb 16th, 2012
Justin – Any chance your company sent out a launch email, or was mentioned in an email in your industry? Often times referrals from an email client show up as “direct” visits in GA.
justin Feb 16th, 2012
It is possible, we sent out press releases to local media and web outlets. I guess those could have been forwarded or included in an email list. It just seems fishy that 98% were new visitors and almost none of them went past the first page. Where with referrals a greater percentage clicked on multiple pages.
admin Feb 16th, 2012
Justin – I agree, it is pretty fishy. Can you look at the server logs and check some of the IPs from visits that day? You might be able to figure it out that way too.
I’ve also thought that something could be broken with the code, but if that were the case all your traffic would show up as direct…not really sure what else it could be.
justin Feb 16th, 2012
Ill check the IPs, thanks for answering on a 2 year old post!
Jared Feb 21st, 2012
Hi, I just had a quick question about the “other” category, specifically RSS feeds. I have a soccer blog and recently (yesterday) we received 83 visitors in the “other” category, or even more specifically “rss/rss”. Does this mean that 83 people suddenly added us to their RSS feed? I find this unlikely as we usually average around 4 per day from the rss/rss category and 83 is over 4 times our previous daily high. I’m just trying to figure out where this traffic came from, any help would be appreciated.
Thanks!
admin Feb 26th, 2012
Jared – Could be that someone shared a link that contained RSS feed tracking tags…could also be that one specific post was so interesting that it got all your subscribers clicking.
I’d see if I could track those clicks to a specific piece of content first, then backtrack from their.
Ann Mar 16th, 2012
One of my traffic sources is from a website that sells Viagra. Yuck! My blog is about quilting. Why would and how did this website pick up on my quilting blog, and how can I make them stop? I don’t want to be associated with them.
admin Apr 5th, 2012
Ann – It’s probably just spammers linking to your site to try and somehow look legit. Don’t give it a second thought – it’s kind of like junk mail. Not much you need to do aside from ignore it.
David Calhoon Jun 1st, 2012
Hi if someone comments on my blog as annonymous can I track where that comment originated from? area, person, place or any such thing?
admin Jun 6th, 2012
David – If your website’s comment system records IP address (as WordPress does, for example) than you can try and locate the IP address using any number of online tools. However, IP addresses aren’t terribly accurate.
Beyond that, it’s a lot more challenging to figure out where anonymous people come from. For privacy concerns, Google analytics specifically blocks that type of info from coming through on their system…
CJ Jun 12th, 2012
Hi,
I’ve just started a bing advertising campaign and I know through microsoft adcentre that I’ve had around 500 people click through to my website from Bing so far this month. However, google analytics tells me I’ve only had 52 clicks from Bing and Yahoo combined for the same time period! Can you tell me why that might be? I’m really confused…
admin Jun 12th, 2012
CJ – It could be that you’re looking at organic search traffic from Bing rather than PPC traffic (they’re separated in Google Analytics).
It might also be that a lot of your Bing PPC clicks are coming from outside the United States, Canada, and/or Western Europe. The amount of click fraud in some countries is incredible…Bing might be billing your for clicks whereas Google Analytics knows better.
If it’s the latter, be sure to contact Bing. They’re usually pretty good about customer service.
Tony Lurie Aug 20th, 2012
It irks me that the little traffic I get on my cartoon blog is sourced by porn sites.
My main worry is that if I ask people to look at toonopia then I might be inadvertently introducing them to these porn sites.
Am I being paranoid?
admin Aug 20th, 2012
Tony – Probably. Very unlikely that anyone would find your referral data. Impossible in fact.
esther Aug 27th, 2012
I am very concerned. I just found a couple traffic sites to my blog that are porn. Who are these people and why are they bothering me!? Can I please get through one day without hearing the word “porn”!? ugh.
Josh Aug 29th, 2012
I am curious about analyzing traffic to specific pages on my site. Is there a way to not just look at overall traffic to the site, but rather traffic to specific pages? For instance, I have a sign up page on my website, and I’d like to know how people are specifically getting there.
admin Aug 30th, 2012
esther – Spammers frequently link to random sites to make their sites look more legit. Don’t give it a second thought – this type of thing is just like load car stereos and gum on sidewalks. Not much we can do about – we just have to live with it.
Melissa Nov 12th, 2012
Hi, can you tell me if Google Analytics referral source (organic, paid, direct) counts the click from the first channel it employes or the last channel? Thanks!
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