How Tracking Your Traffic Sources Can Enhance Your Marketing Campaign

As content marketers, we put quite a bit of focus on page views. We brag about how much views we had on a piece of content or even how many views we have had to our website. While it's good that you are getting lots of visitors to your website on a monthly basis, this metric doesn’t really tell you much else. According to Google, "A page view is defined as a view of a page on your site that is being tracked by the Analytics tracking code. If a user clicks reload after reaching the page, this is counted as an additional page view. If a user navigates to a different page and then returns to the original page, a second page view is recorded as well. "Thus here I am as a marketer bragging that I had 20 views today when it's likely that most of those views were not unique visits. A more helpful metric to track would be traffic sources.

When navigating Google Analytics, you will likely see traffic from the following sources: (Direct traffic, Search Engine, Referring sites, Other). Direct traffic would likely involve those persons who are already familiar with your brand and usually just type in your website address into the URL or visits your website by way of a saved bookmark. If this number is low, it could be that you are finding it challenging to connect with customers and have a retention issue. Referring sites would be those websites that are linking to you for example, pins from Pinterest. Ideally you want this traffic to be as high as possible as this is free traffic, who doesn’t love free? Search Engines sources would be traffic from search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Bing etc. Finally, you have the Other category, these are usually paid traffic sources such as email campaigns and banner ads.

Tracking your traffic sources allows you to better focus on those platforms that are working for you than those that are not. For example, if you realize that you are getting a lot of traffic from Facebook, you may wish to explore the possibility of creating Facebook ad campaigns.
Let's explore an example of this metric in use. Here is an overview of the top five referral sources for Kissmetrics. Kissmetrics is a content analysis platform. From the diagram, you can see that their main source of traffic is from Stumble Upon, Facebook and Google and Twitter. By digging deeper into the Twitter analytics we can identify which tweets are performing and who are your most prominent brand advocates. You can use this information to create similar tweets to replicate the result. Also you can focus your marketing campaigns more on these platforms since these are the main sources your audience is coming from.

 Source: Kissmetrics.com

What are the main referral sources from which you are getting web traffic to your website?  If you haven't already you don’t want to miss my earlier post, It's not you, It's me: How to increase engagement by reducing your bounce rate. In this post I share some tips on how you can go about reducing bounce rate.