Are you using Google Analytics to track website activity? Google Analytics is one of many great Google tools for business. We’ve written about Google Analytics on this blog before. For this post, I want to breakdown Traffic Sources to your small business website.
Google Analytics has its limitations, but for most small business owners, it’s the only website tracking tool they’ll need AND it’s completely free. By analyzing your site traffic, you can make more informed decisions when it comes to promoting your small business website or blog. Each time we create a new blog post for Catalyst Marketers, we promote it through our social networks. These social networks become our traffic sources. They drive readers to our blog.
In the early days of this blog, we would take time to promote each post on sites like StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit, and Mr. Wong. Now, we bypass those social bookmarking sites in order to spend more time promoting our content on sites like Facebook, Twitter, BizSugar and LinkedIn.
The reason that Catalyst Marketers now focuses on using Facebook, Twitter, BizSugar and LinkedIn is because Google Analytics told us that those were the top producing sites for us. On a regular basis, these social networking sites were driving the most traffic, and those visitors were staying on the site longer and viewing more pages that the visitors who found our blog posts on Digg, Reddit and some of the others.
This image was taken directly from the Catalyst Marketers Google Analytics Traffic Sources report. As you can see, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and BizSugar are all in the top 10 traffic sources for Catalyst Marketers. With that said, it’s important to not only focus on quantity of visitors driven from a particular source, but also quality of visit. As you will also see on this report is that StumbleUpon still appears in the top 10 traffic sources for us. What you don’t see is that the quality of those visitors is very low. How do we determine quality of visit?
When determining quality of visit, we look at 3 factors:
- Bounce Rate
- Pages/Visit
- Average Time on Site
By taking these three factors into consideration, we can calculate quality of visit. We like a bounce rate per traffic source to be less than 70%. Bounce rate is determined by dividing the number of people who only view one page on your site before leaving to go to another site, by total site visits from that particular traffic source. We also like our traffic sources to average at least 2 pages/visit. Finally, we want each of our top traffic sources to have an average time on site above 1 minute. We then take all of these factors into consideration and monitor a traffic source over time before making a decision on whether or not to continue using a specific traffic source to promote our blog posts. This process allows us to take advantage of the online social tools that are working hardest for us, without wasting time on tools that are less effective.
The key is finding out what traffic sources are working hard for your small business website. Google Analytics can help you with that. What are your top 10 traffic sources according to Google Analytics?
