Clicks 'n Conversions Blog

This article was first published May 16, 2008 on the Tatum Marketing blog

In my last post I wrote about multiple entry pages and the importance of knowing where your visitors enter your website. But what about where those visitors come from? That’s useful information too.

Here’s a sample page from Google Analytics showing different sources of traffic for a business software website.

What are we looking at here?

“Direct Traffic” includes people who get to your site by actually typing in your URL or by using a bookmark. These are either people who already know you or they’re responding to a call to action from an offline marketing campaign.

“Referring Sites” are other websites that are sending people to your site. Your banner ads and directory listings are included here. So are blogs, partners and anyone else that links to your site.

“Search Engines” means exactly that. This is the percentage of your visitors who found you by typing keywords in a search engine such as Google, Yahoo or MSN as well as any number of smaller & vertical search engines. This includes both paid and non-paid listing.

Now you may be thinking “so what?” But hang on. There’s some very useful info you can get just by glancing at this chart.

For example, if your direct traffic accounts for a large percentage of your overall traffic, you want to take a look at your online visibility. You’re probably too isolated.

Here’s an example of a site for a software company that is doing no online marketing whatsoever – and it shows.

The problem with direct traffic accounting for too much of your overall traffic is that it’s predominantly made up of people who already know you. You’re not generating new prospects. (Note: most web analytics programs will tell you what percentage of your traffic is new versus returning visitors.)

Now let’s look at the search engine traffic.

Since greater than 80% of all web traffic originates from a search engine, you know you’re losing opportunities if search engines only account for 26.12% – as it does in the second example above.

By digging deeper into this number, you’ll find some very useful data, but that’s a subject for another article.

And finally, there are the referring sites. You’re going to have to click on the “referring sites” link to find any actionable information on this one, but it’s worth it. Clink on this link and find your new best friends. These are the sites that are sending you traffic. Now you can get to know them better and find more like them.

Traffic source is also important for another reason. It helps you understand the mindset of your visitor. By looking at where your visitor came from, you can make some educated assumptions about what they’re looking for and design your web pages accordingly.

What about you? How do you use traffic sources information to make your technology marketing program more effective?