Where Does Website Traffic Come From?

Video segment 9 of 12 - click here to watch the full video.

You'll find the report for overall referring traffic sources, under the Referrals section in Urchin, but in Google Analytics they break their traffic source reports into a few categories. Direct traffic results when no link was followed--the visitor just typed our web address directly into their browser, referring sites come via links on other sites, and also Search Engines traffic. Their combined report shows visits from all these sources.

Our referring sites list shows many of the blogs I post comments on as well as our clients' sites--since we usually add a "built by Newfangled Web Factory" link on them. The Search engine report shows me a break down by each engine. One thing I've observed since we redesigned our site is a much higher percentage of Yahoo traffic. This is due to the change in URL structure I mentioned. Yahoo likes our new shorter URLs. I can click through on each search engine to see which keyword phrases are performing best in each engine.

The keyword report shows me which phrases are performing best in search engines. But there's more. If I click through on a particular phrase like "fun websites" and segment that phrase by source I can see exactly which search engines this phrase is performing well on.

You can really slice and dice site data to an amazing degree in Google Analytics.   next >