Kelli

In previous posts, I’ve shown you the basics of Google Analytics and reviewed analytics data and the strategy for a website. This post is going to go into more detail on traffic sources.

On the internet, marketing campaign results can be measured very quickly and cheaply

In the old days, a little pint sized business would get a yellow page listing and buy a few ads in the local newspaper or on the local radio. Then, when a new customer would show up and make a purchase, we would ask “how did you find us?”. For a lot of customers, this feels like an intrusion or a burden on their time. If you’ve ever tried to buy a single 9V battery at Radio Shack, you’ll know what I mean.

Big companies can afford to hire marketing firms and get the data parsed 100 different ways: age, gender, income, zip code, ads seen, favorite TV shows, paper or plastic …. You get the idea. For the rest of us? Yellow pages, Newspaper, Radio, Luck.

Google Analytics helps small businesses track marketing like the big boys. Here’s how.

You can see where your traffic is coming from! Go to the menu on the left and click on Traffic Sources and Overview.  You’ll see a pie chart that looks like this:

Search Traffic

This is telling you how many people found your site using one of the search engines. Let’s look at that data a little more closely:

Keywords:

You can see the top keywords used to find your page. Why is this important? Well, are these the sorts of things you want your site to be know for? If something is surprisingly popular, is it a possible market niche you didn’t know about? When I wrote the articles on doing a SWOT analysis, I didn’t realize that it would be such a popular search term.

When people find my site using that term, are they staying around? Or are they immediately leaving the site? If they are leaving quickly, then I probably want to try to rank well for something besides SWOT or maybe I should try writing some posts they would find interesting to keep them on the site. If they stay around and read more articles, then I should probably work harder on getting more traffic for that search term and providing them some information they want.

Source:

Which search engines are bringing traffic to your site. This will let you know if that Yahoo Local listing is working. If not, you might want to tweak your listing and see if your results improve or not. Just for fun, Google is responsible for 94% of my search traffic!

Referral Traffic:

This will show you if your social media marketing is working, or not. You’ll see the amount of traffic you get from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Google+. You’ll also see if other websites are sending you traffic. Did you win a “Best Of” award? Are you getting traffic from that site. Did you get a mention in the local online paper or Chamber of Commerce website? You’ll know if their readers have clicked on that link to your site. Do you have another website with a link? It will show up.

Use this page to gauge whether your social media campaigns are working. Check traffic against the number of posts on Twitter and see if that has an effect. You can also see if the the time of day that you post on Twitter has an effect. You’ll need to keep track, manually, of when your tweets went out and then compare them to the trafic to your site by the hour.

Landing Page:

This is the first page people visit on your site. This will tell you something about how a page is performing as a traffic magnet. If you write a blog, it will tell you what the most popular posts were for the time period. In most cases, your home page will be the most popular landing page.

One takeaway from this data is: people will not always start at your home page. So, make sure that each page on your website makes it clear what you can do and gives the visitor some instructions on what to do next. Make sure your branding and contact information are on every page! Each page on your website should be able to stand on its own.

Give it a try

Track your referral traffic for one week and plot it against your social media marketing. Does making a change in how you engage with your social network change your referral traffic? Experiment to see what has the most impact, positive or negative, and try to optimize it to increase your website traffic.

In the last post, I covered how to add Google Analytics tracking code to your website and gave you a very brief description of what some of the data is about. In this post, I’m going to show you what real data looks like, what it looks like after you’ve published 31 blog posts in 1 month, and what kind of strategy changes might be needed based on that data.

A Behind the Scenes Look at Massage Therapy World

I write a business and technology blog for massage therapists  called Massage Therapy World. This blog is over 2 years old and gets a pretty fair amount of traffic.

During the month of August, some friends and I decided we would post 31 times in 31 days. For some reason I can’t explain, I had 65 other massage therapists join in on the challenge! (If you’d like a kick in the pants to get you blogging, I’ll let you know the next time we run the challenge). I was curious what all of that blogging would do to the traffic statistics for the blog, so I pulled up my Google Analytics window and checked the stats.

Google Analytics allows you to compare data from 2 different times

This is a feature most people miss, but it’s a really terrific way to tell if something you’ve changed has had an effect.

In your Google Analytics page, click on the date and the window will expand. Click on “Compare to “n and select a time in the past to compare to. Make sure the time periods are the same length.

Results

Just because we’re friends (we are, aren’t we?), I’m going to share some of the traffic data for this blog. I’ve gotten rid of some of the raw numbers, because they don’t really matter much and I don’t want to distract you with that. What I want you to see is the difference between data taken July 2 – 31 and data taken August 1 – 30. Here’s the big graph of VISITS.

The blue line is August, when I blogged every day, and the orange line is July, when I only blogged 6 times in the first half of the month. You also see that the traffic leveled out the last half of the month of August. I was posting later at night and not promoting it as heavily on Social Media. I suspect that the visits dropped due to the time of publication. I’ll experiment with this more in September to see if the time of day continues to have an impact on traffic.

So, that may not look like a completely huge change, but it is. Let’s look at the comparison:

It’s really great that Google does this number crunching for you. It should save the OCD among you some time doing this in a spreadsheet!

Visits and Pageviews were both nearly DOUBLE compared to July. While the Visits were 73% higher, the Unique Visitors was only increased by 35% and % New Visits were down by 23%. All 3 of these changes were in line with my goals. Why would I want a decrease in % New Visits? Because I wanted to see an increase in return rate. In other words, I wanted to write content that would draw the same people to keep coming back for more.

The Pages/Visit increased while the Bounce Rate decreased. These are both in the direction I wanted. Not only were people reading more pages when they visited, but the amount of time they spent on the site increased by 57% – a pretty hefty increase.

Blogs will usually have a higher bounce rate than a static site. Why? Because regular readers will come and read the new post of the day and then wander off. New readers, hopefully, will read the new post, like it, and read a few more posts. A static site will draw in a new audience who will read all of the static pages of a site, preferably leading to a decision to purchase, so the number of pages per visit should be higher and the bounce rate lower for a static website.

Next up: Analyzing the data

I’d love to have you take a quick look at your website stats. In the next post of this series, I’ll explain what some of this data really means and how they sometimes affect one another (think bounce rate vs. pages/visit). In the meantime, if you’ve got questions, leave them in the comments area below.