We’re always being asked questions about understanding Google analytics, and as such we occassionally add some simple step by step guides to our blog. This week we’re going to go through another very simple process of finding out how to view the traffic sources for your website.
First of all, select the time period for which you would like to view. The default time period is one month, but you can choose your exact time frame by clicking the date, followed by a start and end date using the calendar. If you check your analytics data regularly (like me) you may only want to view the last day or so. Alternatively, you may wish to view all the data for the last month, year etc to view which traffic source has the been the most beneficial to your site traffic. Once your time frame is chosen, click the “apply” button, and your traffic graph should update accordingly.
In the navigation on the left hand side, select ‘traffic sources’. This will take you to the main traffic sources page, where you will see the total number of visits your site has received and a pie chart showing the percentages of your traffic sources. From here you can now click on “referring sites” to see which site has given you the most referrals i.e. for the last month a majority of our referrals have come from Sphinn and Twitter. You can also view your direct traffic, which is people that have typed the URL of your website directly into the address bar.
My favourite is the keywords people have used to get to the site. Here you can measure exactly how successful your organic campaigns have been by seeing the most popular keywords people have used to get to the site. For example Manchester SEO and Manchester SEO company both tend to rank near the top. Additionally, of you go to the end of your keyword list you can view all the random key phrases that have got people to your site (normally through blog posts), and it can give you a good insight into how people are finding your site.
For a more advanced technique, you can click on a referring site or keyword, and then choose a ‘dimension’ from the drop down menu. Dimensions include geographic location (i.e. continent, country, city etc), browser types, Flash version and many more. One of the options is “Network location”, which is the name of the network the user was on when they visited your site. This can also be very enlightening! Many big companies have named networks, so they may appear as i.e. Sony Corporation, BBC Manchester etc. You will also get named networks from public networks i.e. Starbucks Manchester etc.
So, have an experiment with Google analytics and see what interesting information you can find out about your site visitors. To find out more, simply contact Elevator and someone will be happy to help!
