I’m a website analytics geek.  I’m always diving into my Google Analytics account to check out how my websites are doing.  Most people are concerned with how MUCH traffic they’re getting.  But that’s not the first number I look at.  The first report I go to when I login to my account is my Traffic Sources Report.

Don’t get me wrong, visits, unique visitors and pageviews are important, but those numbers are highly overrated in my opinion.  Folks tend to gravitate to these analytics numbers because they can understand them.  They require little to no analysis to understand what they mean.  Higher numbers mean more traffic… simple.

Your traffic sources can give you insight as to WHY those numbers are trending the way they are.  And they can give you outstanding insights into your customer intent.  One of the worst mistakes that you can make is to not listen to what your customers, or even worse your potential customers, are telling you.

The chart above the a breakdown of KTC Digital traffic in 2012.  As you can see, 65.51% of our traffic is coming from search, 23.47% was referred to us and 11.02% is direct traffic.  Here’s what that means:

• Search Traffic – Someone has gone to a search engine (Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.) and done a web search.  They’ve then clicked on that result to get to your site.  We LOVE this type of traffic as it’s typically someone who has not done business with us before and is looking to find more info.
• Referral Traffic – Someone has clicked on a link to KTC Digital from another website on the internet.  This may be a link that one of our clients put on their site, a press release, Facebook, Twitter, etc.  This is awesome traffic as well because we can assume that the user already sort of knows what they’re going to get based on the anchor text of the link.
• Direct Traffic – Someone has opened up a browser and typed www.ktcdigital.com into the address bar, or they followed a bookmark.  This is outstanding traffic as well, because it’s someone that has interacted with the site previously and thought highly enough of us to return.

Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll dive into each of these types of traffic a bit more.  Rest assured there are nuggets of information that we can pull from all three of them that can provide ACTIONABLE items for your website.  Do you have an analytics package running on your website?  If you don’t you absolutely should.  Contact us today for a free consultation.  We’d love to help give you this insite into your site.