Web Analytics and Optimization Blog

Tips on Visually Measuring Your Traffic Sources

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Measuring what sources are driving the highest quantity and quality visits to your site is one of the fundamentally most important (and easiest!) things a web analyst can do.

But from many that I’ve spoken to, their traffic sources report usually doesn’t look much different than this:

Then if you’re really lucky you get a slick visual summary of that data in the form of a pie chart!

I’ve got no problem with either of the two ways of displaying data - they both serve to summarize data very well. I’ve only got one question…

Where are my insights!?

The observations I can make from the information above:

• Looks like a lot of our traffic comes from some other site
• Some people come directly
• Not many from search engines

But the questions I’m left with:

• What do they do from these sources?
• What about paid versus organic search?
• What about RSS feeds / e-mail / affiliates? Can’t I see these separately?
• And a whole lot more!

The point is, the presentation of the information above probably creates more questions than answers. But there is a solution!

Here are some useful tips I’ve found for really getting insight out of your traffic sources reporting:

1. Decide on your sources

Your organization is likely complex with a lot of different things going on. You may have e-newsletters, e-blasts, Facebook applications, RSS feeds and who knows what else! All of these efforts may be bringing significant traffic to your website but you may not know.
Talk to people in your organization (marketing is a good start) and try to get a list of all the on-going efforts right now that potentially drive traffic to your site. Try to group all of these efforts into 7-8 main groups. Anything more than that begins to get a bit too detailed and prohibits you from seeing the forest from the trees.
For example you may have:

1. Direct Traffic
2. E-mail (Newsletters, eBlasts)
3. RSS / Atom Feeds
4. Paid Referrals (aka Content Alliances)
5. Non-Paid Referrals (all referrals that you didn’t pay for)
6. Paid Search
7. Organic Search

Make sure that for each group you define the group well so that everyone is on the same page about what’s being included where.

2. Set up tracking on your sources

Now that you know what you want to measure you’ll likely need to put a bit of effort into getting things tagged.
For most analytics tools, tracking these sources independently is as simple as adding a little tag to links in each of these sources so that the tool can identify it.

For example, in my RSS feed, all links have Google Analytics tracking codes

The text that’s underlined above tells Google Analytics, “Hey! This visitor came from the RSS feed so group them in there!”

You’ll have to work with your analytics vendor to know what parameters you’ll have to use, but the method should be similar.

3. Report and find those insights!

Now that you’ve got all that awesome data pulled into your favourite web analytics tool you need a concise way to report on it so that those insights just scream out at anyone looking.

Here’s the most important nugget (in my humble opinion) of this entire article. This is all based on experience, but after a few times of people throwing my reports in the trash, I found what worked for them!

Let’s take a look at the structure of the report first. As you can see from the two biggest headings the only two things I’m really trying to keep track of with this dashboard are:

1. Traffic Quantity and
2. Traffic Quality

Basically all I want to know is:

1. Am I getting traffic and if so, what source do I have to thank for it?
2. Of my ways to improve traffic, which are the most profitable for me?

With that being the “big picture” let’s drill into a few of these graphs.

Am I getting traffic? And if so, who do I thank?

I love these staked bar graphs, I think of them as a time-series pie graph. I can quickly tell if traffic has been increasing or decreasing from month to month and within seconds I know exactly who I have to thank.

While this is great, I still don’t have any idea if the quality of traffic from these sources was any good. Did they convert? Did they bounce? Did they puke?

Which of my sources are providing the highest quality traffic?

My absolute all time most favourite (that’s right favourite - I’m Canadian eh?) graph. What I’m looking at here is

• Pageviews per Visit along the horizontal axis
• Bounce rate along the vertical axis and
• Visits determine the overall bubble size

Now I’ve chosen Pageviews per Visit and Bounce Rate here because those are the three metrics that currently provide the best indicator of traffic quality. If you were an e-commerce or lead generation site you may graph Bounce Rate along the vertical and Conversion Rate along the horizontal.

Generally I like to ensure the bubble size is still related to a traffic quantity metric like visits or unique visitors. This is simply to ensure you don’t spend a lot of time optimizing a high quality source that can only bring in 1% of your overall site traffic.

This second graph may require a bit of explanation. Essentially the optimal goal of analyzing your marketing sources (or traffic sources) is to understand return on investment.

So to understand ROI, we need to know our cost per visit and revenue per visit by source. You can literally devote a whole blog post to understanding how to calculate cost per visit and revenue per visit for different websites.

For my blog, my value equations are pretty simple:

Revenue per Visit = (Pageviews per Visit x Ads per Pageview) / 1000 x CPM

Cost per Visit = $0! (The costs in the chart above are added just to illustrate what it could look like - actually the revenue numbers are fake too :))

(In case you’re wondering CPM is available for AdSense customers but is listed as eCPM as Google doesn’t actually provide publishers with any money for the number of impressions they provide.)

When I spoke at eMetrics a lot of people asked me how they can get through to their boss or senior executives about web analytics. If you really want to connect with them, stop talking about web analytics, talk about what’s on their mind - revenues and costs!

4. Go ask for that raise!

Now that you’ve given your marketing team and organization the tools they need to properly understand where to allocate their budgets for maximum profitability, head up to your favourite HIPPO and ask for a raise!

I’d love to hear from you! What are your thoughts on this dashboard? What’s missing? What would you add?

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