A beginner's guide to Google Analytics, part 4 - Traffic sources and Content

< A beginner's guide to Google Analytics, part 3 - Comparing statistics : Alexa ranking has completely changed >

Missed a previous instalment in this series?  Read the earlier parts and other related articles in the Site Statistics area.

This time we're going to look at a couple more areas of Google Analytics: Traffic Sources, and Content.

What are Traffic Sources?

These show you how people are finding your site.  There are three traffic sources:

1. Direct traffic.  This refers to the people who typed the address of your site manually, or clicked a link in their browser favourites.
2. Referring sites.  If another website links to a page on your site and someone clicks the link, that site will be listed as a referring site.
3. Search engines.  If someone searches for a particular type of content, your site comes up in the results and they click the link to your site, that will be listed here.

From the Traffic Sources Overview (click on Traffic Sources in the navigation menu to reach this page), you'll see how the above three traffic sources are split up.  A list of the top traffic sources is shown at the bottom.



Clicking on a link will take you to a page with more information, with the exception of Direct Traffic.  That link will just restate some of your basic statistics from the Dashboard.

Referring Sites

Clicking on the Referring Sites link from the Traffic Sources Overview will show you a list of the sites that brought people to your site.



When you first load the page, the sites that generated the most visits are at the top.  You can easily reorder the list by clicking on one of the column headers.  For instance, you can click on "Avg Time on Site" to display the sites that generated visits where people stayed the longest.  You can also display the sites that generated the highest bounce rate.  To sort in reverse order (lowest to highest), click on the column heading twice (wait for it to load between the clicks - don't double-click it).

There are also some options at the bottom of the table where you can search, or move between pages.

Search engines

This page works just like the referring sites page, but it lists the search engines instead of the referring sites.  As before you can choose how to sort the information in the table, or search if you wish.

Keywords

You can find this page by clicking on the Keywords link on the navigation menu.  You must be viewing one of the Traffic Sources pages before the link will show up.

Keywords are individual words or phrases that you type into a search engine to find the sites you want to visit.  In Google Analytics, the Keywords page shows you which words or phrases brought people to your site.



If you don't see the words or phrases you think people should be searching for to find your site, you may have to do a bit of search engine optimisation.  Clicking that link will take you to a guide where I've outlined some things you can do yourself without embarking on a huge "optimisation project".

The thing to remember is that there will always be other sites for people to visit, and even the most "well-optimised" sites cannot guarantee success by optimisation alone.  Start by writing great content.  Optimisation is worth looking into, but there's not much point spending time on it if you aren't writing content that people would want to read.  It's a case of getting your priorities straight.

Content Overview

Click on the Content link in the navigation menu and you'll see the Content Overview page.



You'll see a list of the 5 most viewed pages on your site, with a link to view more ("view full report").  Click on this and you'll see another table that can be searched and sorted as with the previous ones.  I won't include a screenshot this time as it's the third table we've looked at in this post.  One thing to note, however, is that a single forward slash "/" refers to your home page.

Navigation Analysis

Back on the Content Overview page, there are some links on the right-hand side of the page.  Click on Navigation Summary to open the first of these pages.



Along the top you'll see a drop down list called "Content" with the single forward slash "/" as the current page.  This shows that we're looking at the analysis for my home page.

Beneath that, we have some percentages.  On the left, we can see how many people viewed the home page as their first page on the site (85.34% Entrances) and how many came from another page on the site (14.66% Previous Pages).  If you add together the two percentages on the left, they should total 100%.

On the right, we can see how many people left after viewing the home page (78.20% Exits) and how many went to another page (21.80% Next Pages).  Again, adding the two percentages should total 100%.

You can even see which pages people moved from and to.  The "/" as both a previous page and a next page to/from itself could be due to refreshing the page, or possibly due to images or scripts.  I'm not 100% sure about this part though - further ideas welcome.

Meanwhile, clicking on an address listed on this page will show the navigation analysis for that page.  You can also choose other pages using the arrow at the end of the "Content" list, where the current page is shown.

There are some other links in the "Analyze" drop down list, but you've come this far - why not try a couple on your own?

Next time?

I still have to cover a couple of pages but this part fills in most of the gaps, so with any luck you should be well on your way now.

Has this guide helped you?  I'd love to hear your feedback.  Thanks for reading!

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