Digital Marketing This Week: Episode 19 – Google Analytics: Where Are My Visitors Coming From?

On this episode of Digital Marketing This Week, we continued our series on Google Analytics For Beginners with Part 2, “Where are my visitors coming from?”  It's all about tracking your traffic sources and understanding exactly how your visitors found you.

It’s so easy to get overwhelmed with Google Analytics—so make sure that you get that ONE idea and take action on that idea. That is the simplest way to get things done and learn how to use Google Analytics.

Today, you'll discover:

• How your visitors found you
• What keywords they are using
• How to prove your social media is working
• How to track specific ads

This is basically what this report looks like:

Now, let me take you through the different sections that make up this entire section here–

Let’s start with the Acquisition Overview.

Acquisition Overview

Basically, it gives you a visual summary of what’s going on on your site. You can change things like segments, what its graphing, different goal options, number of sessions coming through and the actual report data.

These sections are Google’s best guess–it’s not necessarily precise, but it is a good place to start. This is why it’s important that you customize all of these. This section also shows you how your different traffic sources lead into more specific actions on your site.

Moving on to Channels.

Channels

This refers to the general marketing path that your traffic is taking to find you.

You can click on the individual sections to determine what sites (third party, mostly) are sending audience to your website.

Be sure to watch the entire webinar (the video on this page) to get more tips and details on how to review and gain insight from this particular section of the blog.

Next is All Traffic.

All Traffic

When you want to find out about specifics–particularly the source and medium. Source is determined by you, by telling Google that this is where your traffic is coming through or it’s Google making its best guess. And Medium is how that traffic is coming through.

And to explain why you need tracking, let’s take a look at Campaigns

Campaigns

You have to start by defining your campaign tags so that you can track activity for specific campaigns that you are hosting. To see what specifically about your campaign is working (which is essential when you want to replicate something), you can simply click on these tags to determine the metrics that drove its success. Was it guest blog posts? YouTube videos? PPC posts?

There’s lots of different things that this particular report can help you with and setting these up is how you will know which one works and which doesn’t. We have a live demonstration on how to work through the different elements on this page and how to customize your tracking tags so be sure to watch the entire webinar.

Next, I’m going to jump into keywords

Keywords

There are two main sections–paid and organic. For organic keywords. It’s offers several sections that defines audiences that came through Google and from other search engines. Now the paid section tracks which ads (for paid keywords) are getting us optins; making it very useful for using your tracking codes.

In the video I went through all of these sections in detail using our Googe Analytics account.  Check it out to get more ideas and instructions on how to familiarize yourself with the more advanced sections of Google Analytics’ Acquisition report, including figuring out what the actual sales are from specific ads you took out, how your social media impacts your traffic and queries.

Here’s the bottom line–understanding who and where your audience is coming from means you can better spend your marketing dollars.

For more, be sure to watch out for our weekly webinar by signing up at www.seriouslysimplemarketing.com. New episodes are up every Wednesday.

– Mercer