Do you know where your site’s traffic comes from? Do you know how to find out? These are two questions that, if you know the answers, could help you determine where to focus more of your attention to drive more traffic to your site. Social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube could be helping more than you know.
Google Analytics
If you’re not using Google Analytics on your site yet, I highly recommend it. It’s a free and easy way to get some useful information about your site quickly.
It can tell you things like:
- how many folks are stopping by
- how long they’re staying
- how many pages they’re peeking at
- which pages they use to enter the site
- which pages they use to exit
- and yes, …where they’re coming from
Are Social Media Sites Helping You?
Google Analytics tells me about 25% of my site’s traffic come from Twitter. That’s a fairly significant number. (still not using Twitter?) I also get a good percentage of visitors from Facebook. LinkedIn is not far behind, but it could be better. YouTube isn’t on the map yet. (sorry, I’ll try to be more active there)
Google Search and Direct Traffic
Google search is driving about 30% of my business to me. That’s just from organic search results. If I were running AdWords, it would tell me this too. The biggest portion is people coming directly to the site on their own.
How Does This Help?
This kind of information is helpful to me. It can tell me how much interest am I creating from my social media presence. Is it worth cultivating that environment more? I spend the most time on Twitter and Facebook and the numbers reflect that. It shows me how I might want to see what I can do with my YouTube or LinkedIn presence to bring more traffic from those sites.
Set Google Analytics up on your site. Watch it for a while and see what kinds of information you’re able to get. Processing and figuring out what to do with this information can require more analysis on your own, but this is a good place to start.
How Does Google Analytics Help You?
Are you using Google Analytics? How have you found it to be helpful? Or have you? Let me know in the comments!
