How To Find Out What Sources & Channels Send You The Highest Quality Traffic

In this video, you are going to learn how to find out what sources send you the highest quality traffic. And I’ll also be showing you how you can see what marketing channel is producing you the best results. Both of these are crucial to know as if you are looking to grow your business, once you discover what these sources and channels are, you can then allocate your marketing spend in those specific areas, knowing that the sources and channels are going to generate you the best ROI for your money. So to find the highest quality source of traffic, what you want to do is go into acquisition. As remember, acquisition shows us a report of how we actually acquire those visitors.

So go into acquisition and then go to “All Traffic” and then go to “Source/Medium.” I have the data range selected as the last 30 days. And if you scroll down on this page, you can see we’ve got tons of different sources and different mediums. To clarify it, the source is a place where users are before they see your content, and the medium describes how users arrived at your content. So for the first example, we can see that their users were on Google and they found our content by carrying out an organic search, as organic is the medium. For the second example, we can see that users were on Google, once again.

However, they found our website this time through a CPC, which stands for cost per click, which relates to a paid ad. For the one below that, we can see the user was on humaxdigital.com, and the medium was actually a referral. So users were referred from this website over to our content. So that’s essentially how you read the source and medium in the first column. As you can see, the biggest source of traffic, in the last 30 days for this specific website, has all come from Google organic searches. Which is actually really nice to know as this is one of the clients we work with and we do all the SEO for them.

So knowing that the majority of the traffic is coming from organic searches, which of course relates to SEO, is really reassuring to know. We can see that from Google organic searches, this actually resulted in 39% of all the traffic to the website in the last 30 days. The second most popular channel is actually their paid advertisements they are running. Followed by this other website, below Humax Digital, in position three. Now this is primarily based on the amount of users that these sources are sending to the site every single month.

However, as we want to find out the highest quality of traffic and not just what produces the most traffic, it’s more useful to look at the columns under “Behavior” here in the middle of the screen. And under “Behavior” we can see the bounce rate, the pages per session, and the average session duration. So we can see that for Google organic, the bounce rate is 53%, the pages per session is 2.62, and the average person spends roughly 2 minutes and 38 seconds on the website. If we compare that to people coming on a website through paid advertisement, which is Google CPC, we can see the bounce rate is a little bit higher at 66%, the pages per session is just 2.06.

So on average, people view more pages when they come through organic searches in comparison to paid advertisements. And we can also see that the average session duration is only 1 minute and 44 seconds, which is almost one whole minute shorter than those who are coming through our website through organic searches, as organic searches is 2 minutes and 38 seconds. We can also see how many of those users actually converted and actually bought one of their products which should be listed as a transaction if you own an e-commerce website. And we can also see how much revenue has been generated by that specific source and medium.

Essentially, what this data is telling us is that the majority of people coming to our website are coming through Google organic searches. The people that come through Google organic searches, they bounce a lot less on our website. The users typically visit more pages per sessions. They spend longer on our websites and they actually spend more money on our websites as well, all in comparison to paid advertisements. So hopefully you can see just how powerful this data actually is. As once you actually go into your acquisition reports, you can really, really understand exactly what sources are driving the most revenue for your specific business.

If you’d like to see a more wider view of exactly all of these sources and mediums, as you can see, number one is Google organic. We also have number five, which is Bing organic. So these are both organic users. One type has just come from Google and the other type has come from Bing. So if you’d like to categorize organic all into one channel, so you can really see what type of channel is driving all the results. Then what you need to do is go to “Channels” under “Traffic” at the top. And then Google Analytics will categorize all of this traffic based on what channel it came from.

So as we can see that once again, the number one driver of traffic to this website is coming from organic searches, followed by number two, which is paid searches. We can also see all the details as well, such as the bounce rate, pages per session, the average session duration, and the revenue for these channels on the whole, as well. And once again, it’s the same story, organic search is number one. Organic search is typically going to be king, when you are running any marketing campaign, as people who land on your website organically, haven’t really been forced to do so.

Where if you’re showing an ad in front of that user, then essentially you’re paying to be in front of that user. A lot of people are aware of this, which is why they won’t actually click ads in the first place. But nevertheless, it’s always good to come into your analytics and see exactly what the data shows, as I have seen loads and loads of Google Analytics accounts that have actually better numbers for the paid advertisements than organic searches. Which just goes to show, if you do set up a Google Ad campaign, really, really well, then it’s not going to have that much of an impact in regards to how much people convert and buy your products.

So now you know how to pull insights out of your acquisition reports. It’s over to you to go into your acquisition reports, so you can start to pull out some actionable data that you can use to grow your business further. I’ll see you in the next one.