Understanding Your Website’s Traffic Sources

When you have a website, you want to know more than merely how much traffic your site is getting -- you want to go deeper to find out the sources of that traffic. If you don’t pay attention to how people are actually making their way to your site, you won’t have the information you need to grow that traffic and to accurately measure and evaluate the success of your efforts to attract visitors.

At Fryed Egg, we work with our clients to meticulously track traffic sources, such as search engines, digital ads, newsletters, social media posts and backlinks from other sites, among others. Equipped with this information, we collaborate to strengthen their sites and build their audiences. Here are some reasons that tracking traffic sources to your website is a crucial piece of website analytics that deserves close attention.

Measuring the success of campaigns

Studying the traffic sources to your site allows you to gauge the success of your integrated marketing campaigns and the specific tactics that you have used in them. Fryed Egg uses UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) codes attached to the end of a URL to measure the effectiveness of digital marketing campaigns. These codes can pinpoint specific sources of traffic to your site so that you can see how successful each tactic was at drawing new traffic. That allows you to measure the success of everything from digital display ads and search ads to blogs and social media posts so that you can fully and precisely evaluate a campaign to identify what worked and what can be improved for future campaigns.

Building on popularity

If you evaluate your traffic sources, you can determine where your website is gaining the most traction. That will prompt you to take a closer look at why that source has brought your site users and then to consider how you can build on that success, such as by directing more content or advertising toward that source. Keeping regular tabs on traffic sources for our clients allows us to monitor areas of strength and to take advantage of the opportunities that they offer.

Finding room for improvement

Similarly, when you understand how traffic is coming to your site, you will recognize what areas are underperforming. If you are not attracting traffic from your social media channels, for instance, you should assess your social media strategy with fresh eyes and look for ways to improve it and make it more productive for your website.

Identifying toxic sources

Assessing your traffic sources sometimes will bring bad news about how viewers are connecting with your site. For instance, occasionally you will receive traffic via backlinks that are considered toxic by Google. These sites, such as pornography sites or foreign propaganda sites, link to your website and send a small amount of traffic to you. Fryed Egg looks out for those traffic sources for our clients and disavows them to Google, essentially telling Google that you don’t want this traffic to your site and are not associated with it. That assures that Google won’t penalize your site in search results for the toxic links to it.

Tracking traffic sources is only one of the ways that Fryed Egg manages websites for our clients and works to attract visitors to them through creative, carefully targeted campaigns. If you want to see if Fryed Egg is the right agency for your needs, contact us at (813) 478-0494 or [email protected] or visit www.FryedEgg.com.