Rebecca Haden: Learn from Your Traffic Sources

When you look at your dashboard at Google Analytics, one of the bits you should always notice is the Traffic Sources. The first view you have is a pie chart showing how your visits are distributed among Direct Traffic, Referring Sites, Search Engines, and Other.

Here's what those terms mean:

Direct Traffic is people typing in your address or going straight to it from their bookmarks. Sometimes lots of direct traffic means that you have an easy to remember URL (good for you!) and it's just as simple for people to type it in as to search. Sometimes it means that you haven't filtered out your staff. If you have a high proportion of direct traffic, check to see whether it's new visitors, in which case you've got a good URL and people looking for you by name. Lots of direct traffic from return visitors is good news, too, of course, but filter out people working for you before you make plans based on that.
Referring Sites is what you get when people follow a link to your website. This lets you see what kind of links send traffic, so you can build more of those. It also lets you know when you've gotten featured at Stumbleupon or Digg. And it helps you find sites that have linked to you without your having requested it.
Search Engines refers to people who found you by typing something in at a search engines like Google or Yahoo or bing.
Other is anything else, often email (though that can also show up in Referring Sites).

Click on "view report" under the pie chart and you'll get more detail:

You can see that these two examples show different patterns. The one above shows fairly steady traffic from all three sources. The one below doesn't have much direct traffic, but it's fairly steady through the week, while Referring Sites and Search Engines rose at the end.

As with most patterns, changes are often the most interesting thing. When you have your quick look at your analytics each day, changes should be what you're looking for. When you see a change, find out the reason for it. If it's a good thing, do more in that direction. If it's not so good, then it's time to change your strategy.

Bear in mind that the pie chart is about percentages. An increase in search traffic can show that your SEO efforts are paying off, or it can show that more people are looking for one of your keywords, or it can show that your direct traffic fell because you got around to filtering out the people who work on your site.

At the Traffic Sources report page, you can look at lots more data. For example, you'll see the Top Traffic Sources, which is a list in order of popularity of your traffic sources. You'll see the top five on the main page, and you can click on "view full report" to see all of them.

Google is very likely to be your #1 source. For most of my clients, a major referring source comes next. Direct traffic is usually in the top five. For many, social media such as blogs, Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook turn up here.

Again, changes are what you want to notice. When I see a directory in this list, I suggest thinking about a paid ad at that directory. When I see a new source move into the list for the first time, I run right over and check its conversion rate for the site's goals. The information here can help you make well-founded strategic decisions.

The Traffic Sources report page is also the starting point for lots more detailed information. You can narrow down your focus and see where your direct traffic is geographically, or all the referring sites and their conversion rates, or what keywords people are using to reach you (you can use your keyword data strategically, too). You can also check the performance of your adwords campaigns from this menu.