Where Are My Customers Coming From?
All users on your website have come from different sources on the internet. Every visitor arrives from somewhere, whether that’s clicking a link on Facebook or typing your address directly into their browser. Figuring out where and how users are finding you, assists you massively in learning about your audience, ultimately marketing your site more effectively.
Understanding where your customers or clients are coming from is a crucial part of marketing in order for you to keep scaling as a business. It is also essential that you try different sources of traffic rather than “placing all your eggs into one basket”. For instance, you may allocate most of your budget in social ads and that’s great as it drives high conversions. However by doing this you will never know if Google Ads for example is a better option for your specific products and services.
New Online Road highly recommends evenly spreading your marketing budget across at least 3 different traffic sources. This way you can carefully study what is working better, ultimately putting down a higher investment in that channel as you know it is driving in conversions for your business.
Google Analytics allows you to find out what your traffic sources are and how each of them is performing.
Examples of Traffic Sources
Traffic sources on Google Analytics indicate where your customers have actually come from, where they clicked or searched for your website. There are seven main traffic sources which Google Analytics will categorise your traffic in:
Organic: A user comes to your site directly from a search engine such as Google, Yahoo, or Bing. This is from free clicks in which your website has to be optimised first in order to appear in search results.
Direct: Direct traffic is when a user directly types in your website URL or clicks on a link from an email, PDF, or saved bookmark. Any traffic that Google doesn’t have the source information on is also considered direct.
Display: This is when a user clicks on paid advertising and being redirected to your site. This can come from image banners or Youtube videos across the web.
Email: Also known as EDM, email traffic is generated through email marketing campaigns in which users can click onto your website.
Paid Search: This is traffic which comes from PPC ads or Search Engine Marketing such as Google Ads.
Referral: This is traffic generated from another website in which your site is linked and a user has clicked on.
Social: This indicates a user has clicked on your website link through any major social media platform such as Facebook or Instagram.
Conclusion
Knowing exactly where your customers are coming from through traffic sources on Google Analytics will help you determine where you should focus your marketing efforts as well as seeing which campaigns perform better on different platforms.
Take a deep look at your users origin as this can mean the difference point between success and failure. If you are investing in marketing across several platforms however you do not know which platform is bringing in the most users, this can highly waste your budget.
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