Traffic sources tell you where your website visitors are coming from.
And that data helps you make sense of your website’s current performance, measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns, and find opportunities to improve performance in the future.
You probably want to know this kind of information about your website:
- What traffic sources bring the phone number lead most visitors to your site?
- How does your organic search traffic compare to your paid search traffic?
- How are your marketing campaigns working?
- Do visitors from Google engage with your content more than visitors from Facebook?
- How do different traffic sources contribute to conversions on your website?
Data from Google Analytics traffic sources helps you answer those questions.
To understand Google Analytics traffic sources, you first need to understand metrics and dimensions. And how they work together.
What are metrics?
Google Analytics metrics are quantitative measurements made about a website. A metric can be time-based, revenue-based, or numerical. Or it can be a percentage or ratio.
One example is the total number of visits to your determine the stage your client is in website. In Google Analytics, website visits are called sessions (a visit that starts when someone arrives at your site and ends after 30 minutes of inactivity). You’ll also hear visits and sessions referred to as “website traffic.”
Let’s say your web analytics traffic data shows that your company’s website had 111,444 sessions on your site over the last 28 days.
This session count is an example of a metric.
Where did those sessions come from? To answer that question, you need dimensions.
What are Dimensions?
Unlike quantitative metrics, dimensions are descriptive attributes of your data. They are typically text-based and provide additional information about your metrics.
Let’s take a closer look at those 111,444 sessions from earlier.
You can see that 105,513 of those sessions came from Google, with smaller amounts coming from “(direct)” (i.e. people who came directly to your site, such as by entering your URL into their browsers) and Bing.
The source of those sessions is called the Session Source dimension, and you can see how it provides new insights into our metric.
This is one dimension of traffic source, but you’ll find there are many more.
Ways to classify traffic sources in Google Analytics
Google Analytics classifies traffic in different ways to provide multiple layers of analysis. These different classifications are dimensions of the traffic source.
There are five dimensions of traffic source that you need to know.
- Session Source : The specific source that is sending the traffic
- Session Medium : The type of traffic
- Source/medium of the session : A combination of the two previous dimensions
- Session Campaign : Traffic coming from a specific marketing campaign
- Session Default Channel Grouping : Rule-Based Traffic Group Definitions
Let’s review each of them.
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The traffic source dimension tells you the specific location (i.e. website or platform) where your traffic is coming from.
Let’s go back to the company example above. You’ve already seen your Session source data, with the majority of traffic coming from Google and smaller amounts from Bing and direct traffic.
It’s helpful to know that Google is your most important source of traffic. But what if you’re running paid search ads on Google and also working to increase your organic search traffic?
This dimension doesn’t tell you how much of your traffic comes from paid search versus organic search.
To do this, you need to look at your traffic medium.
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Traffic medium tells you what kind of traffic is coming to your website. Another way to look at it is how that traffic got to your site.
Below you can see the same 111,444 sessions classified at the average Session level.
This is what the first five rows mean:
- Organic : Unpaid traffic from search engines
- (none) : Traffic from a visitor typing your URL into a browser or going to a bookmark
- gmb : Manually classified traffic from a Google business listing that has an Urchin Tracking Model (UTM) code . A UTM code is a piece of text added to the end of the URL of a link pointing to your website. It helps you track the performance of your digital marketing campaigns.
- Referral : Traffic from other websites that are not search engines (including social networks)
- cpc : Traffic from Google Ads
Source and medium.
Google Analytics may combine the traffic source and medium dimensions into another dimension called Session Source/Medium.
With this particular traffic source, Google Analytics shows that your Google traffic is coming from three different sources. And you can see that organic traffic accounts for the largest percentage.
You can also use UTM parameters to display traffic from specific marketing campaigns.
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You can use the campaign dimension to angola latest email list associate your traffic with specific advertising campaigns.
With the exception of Google Ads traffic (which will automatically populate the campaign name), Google Analytics will not report on campaigns by default. You need to use UTM parameters to categorize marketing campaign data.
