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Analyzing Traffic Sources: Where are your visitors coming from?

January 10th, 2009
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In my post, A Model to Improve Traffic Conversion, I refer to four questions that must be answered to effectively recommend and prioritize changes that improve conversion rates. In this post, I go into depth about how to analyze your traffic sources.

Model Attributes

Dimension: Source
Question: Where did they come from?
Type of Data: Quantitative
Intent or Result: Intent

Why It’s Important

Collecting data for basic web analytics like referrers or sources provides visibility into how a visitor came upon your site.  While this is a key metric, it does not offer any insight into the effectiveness of those sources.

For example, say you’re a mortgage broker using PPC as your primary marketing effort and banner advertising as your secondary.  80% of your monthly budget is allocated to PPC while only 20% is allocated to banner ads - and your traffic shows it.  10,000 visits a month to your site as a result of the PPC campaigns, but only 200 from your banner ads.  If you stopped your analysis there, your takeaway would be that your PPC campaigns were performing well and meeting your goals.

However, let’s look further.  You’ve established a primary goal - completion of a form to contact you for more information.  A total of 100 visitors complete the form - 10 from your PPC campaigns and 90 from your banner ads.  It’s a completely different picture.  A picture that may lead you to shift more of your budget to banner ads!

Remember… It’s not enough to know how they are getting to your site.  Instead,  it is an important dimension to track as part of the 360 degree view of your visitors.

Web Analytics

From Wikipedia:

Web analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of internet data for purposes of understanding and optimizing web site usage.

Several free and inexpensive tools are available and are listed at the end of the post.

Web analytics provides the quantitative data you need to understand where your users are coming from.

Standardized Web Analytics Definitions

I always favor standardization.  The Web Analytics Association released a draft on  Web Analytics Definitions for public comment.  The following is a summary of the WAA  standardized definitions as they relate to this post.

Referrer

Referrer is a generic term that describes the source of traffic to a page or visit and are often collected into meaningful groups to facilitate analysis.

Groups often encountered are:

  • Internal ReferrerThe internal referrer is a page URL that is internal to the web site or a web-property within the web site as defined by the user. Not all tools report internalreferrers as a group.
  • External ReferrerThe external referrer is a page URL where the traffic is external or outside of the web site or a web-property defined by the user.
  • Search ReferrerThe search referrer is an internal or external referrer for which the URL has been generated by a search function. Many tools segment and report on search referrers as a group; however the exact definitions vary from tool to tool. Most will include the “big” search engines, such as Yahoo, Google, and MSN/Live. However, they vary in whether or not they exclude mail servers from these sources, or whether they use wildcards to capture any URL containing the word “search.”
  • Direct Navigation (aka No Referrer)The referrer value is empty or null. An empty referral string is often assumed to indicate that the user either directly entered the URL or selected from a list of bookmarks, but this is not always the case. Some user agents such as email clients, news readers, ad servers, and others may not set the referrervalue in the request header and thus the referrer is unknown.
Page Referrer

Describes the source of traffic to a page.

Session Referrer

The first page referrer in a visit.

Visitor Referrer

The first page referrer in a visitor’s first session.

Appending Information to URLs to Determine Source

Most web analytic solutions provide the ability to define custom variables like campaign, channel and a pre-defined source.  By appending information to URLs that drive traffic to your site (like on web pages, emails, tweets) you can more easily group data to determine campaign effectiveness.

Summary

Understanding your traffic sources is important in determining the effectiveness of your online campaigns.  Keep in mind, however, that this is just one piece of the puzzle.  Check back this week for upcoming posts to answer the remainder questions:

  • Why did they come? (motivation)
  • What did they do? (activity)
  • What did they think? (perception)
Web Analytics Solutions

I’ve listed a few web analytics solutions below.  It’s not an all-inclusive list so please feel free to comment about others.

Free or Free Trial
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