How To Understand Google Analytics

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by: Dev Sperling | search engine marketing, search engine optimization

A finger pointing to the word, analytics.

 

 

 

 

 

In a blog post from earlier this month, we dissected Google Adwords. In today’s blog post, we are going to cover the traffic types by channel. On Google Analytics, you can measure how your marketing strategies are performing on social media platforms, search engines, emails, and third-party listing sites.

Organic Traffic – Traffic that comes through optimizing for search engines. This means any link that is clicked on search engine page results (SERP) that is not an ad (ads are marked with a little “ad” symbol). It can also be called “natural traffic.”

Direct Traffic – When someone types your URL directly into the search bar or has your URL (or a link on your site) saved as a bookmark.

Display Traffic – These are the display ads that show up when users visit a website outside of your own. Google has so much information that they have lists of specifically targeted users to whom you can show your ads. Display campaigns tend to have higher bounce rates, between 60-80%, since these are being shown on different sites and are when the user is not actively searching for your company or service.

Social – This is a section in Google Analytics that pools in traffic from all of your social sites. This does not include paid advertisements.

Facebook Advertising – This is traffic coming from our Facebook campaigns. You want to differentiate this traffic in Google Analytics so you can see the difference between Organic Facebook Traffic (natural clicks from your normal posts) and Paid Facebook Traffic (sponsored posts, campaigns etc.).

Paid Search – This traffic source is all paid search advertisements in Google, Bing, and other search engines. Paid search is one of the most important sources to track and optimize to ensure you are reaching the ROI you desire.

Referral – If you use a third-party listing site, any traffic driven to your website from these other sites are considered referral traffic. For instance, say you have a profile for your company on a site that lists other companies, such as Angie’s List, Home Advisor, etc., and someone clicks your website. This would be considered referral traffic.

At Sperling Interactive, we use Google Analytics to track how our clients’ online marketing strategies are performing. To learn how we can help you, call us at (978) 304-1730.