In my last blog entry, I covered the basics of deciphering analytics and understanding the difference between a hit and a view. This entry will focus on looking at your traffic, analyzing where your traffic comes from and determining how this information impacts your site.

The first useful piece of information to be aware of is referrers. A referrer is the domain that sent a visitor to your site (i.e.  Amazon.com, Google.com), oftentimes your site will be the top referrer since you link to other pages on your site. By viewing referrers you can easily see which domains are driving traffic to your site. This helps see if, for example, a new ad campaign with a partner is generating additional traffic to your site and whether it is a result of the ad campaign.

Referrals can actually be broken down a step further into specific page referrers. Page referrals provide you with information that details exactly what page referred the visitor to your site. Oftentimes, this can show you if someone recently started linking to your site (i.e. a blog post about your site) or how much traffic partners are generating for your site( i.e. a specific banner for an ad campaign). Page referrers will help give you a better idea of exactly who your traffic is coming from and where. Armed with that information, you can see where you can work on getting more visibility for your site. 

There is one important subset of referrers and perhaps the most important, search engines. Search engines are one of the most common ways that people go about locating websites. Using web analytics, you will be able to see which search engines referred people to you and more importantly what they searched for to find you. You can see what search phrases people used to reach your site and adapt your strategy based on the information. There will potentially be search phrases that you didn’t foresee people associating with your site. This is excellent information for understanding how customers are finding you. Armed with this information you can enhance your visibility and strategy to get more visitors to your site.