Where is Your Website Traffic Coming From?

A few days ago, an old friend for whom I built a website a few years ago asked me to take a quick look and tell her my recommendations.

One of the things I told her her was “You are getting twice as many visitors to your website from Yelp as you are from YelloPages.com.  You are getting the Yelp traffic for free, but you are paying YellowPages.com $1600/month.  Maybe you want to rethink that.”

That nugget of information was easily gleaned from her Google Analytics:

1. After logging in to your Google Analytics Account, scroll down to ‘Behavior’ and click on it.
2. Under Behavior is ‘Site Content’.  Click on it.
3. Under Site Content is ‘All Pages’. Click on it.
4. Just above the ‘Page’ column is a drop-down labeled ‘Secondary dimension’. Click on it.
5. Expand ‘Behavior’
6. Click on ‘Full Referrer’

A column will be added to the table containing a url or other indication of where the visitor is coming from when they landed on the page. I like to export the table to Excel so I can sort and manipulate the data.

Slightly different subject: Often, you will see a large amount of traffic coming from Google to a specific page that is buried deep in your website or blog. Were they interested in what you have or were they looking for something else?  The ‘Average Time on Page’ and ‘Bounce Rate’ give us a clue.  ‘Bounce rate’ is the percentage of website visitors who arrived at this page and then left your website without exploring any other pages. So if the bounce rate is high and the Average Time on Page is short they were probably looking for something else.  Sometimes Search analytics can give us a clue but that’s beyond the scope of this little post.