Traffic sources – referrers reports

Overview  

This report gives you a snapshot view of your most popular traffic sources, gather referring sites, search engine traffic and direct traffic altogether. Also shows you the top keywords used in organic search engine results through which your site was visited. This is a static, dashboard-type report: You can’t segment with other data.

Direct Traffic  

This shows you how many of your visitors came to your site directly, either by typing in the address manually or by visiting your site through a bookmark. Even though Google doesn’t mention this, in some instances referrer data is lost (caused by a variety of reasons). This happens with all hosted web analytics tools, and such traffic will be classified under Direct Traffic as well.

Referring Sites  

Find out which sites are providing you with visitors and which ones are providing you with the best converting ones. Interesting report that allows you to look for good campaign opportunities. If you see that though a natural link you’re getting good quality visitors it might be worth it trying out some sponsored/advertised links.

Search Engines  

Shows you how your organic search engine traffic is doing and which search engines are providing you with this traffic.

All Traffic Sources

This is the more handy version of the Overview report: A gathering of data from all traffic sources, which can then be cross-referenced with other data sources.

Keywords  

This keyword analysis report shows you the keywords that are used by search engine visitors who click the search result to your site. This is a relatively important report in that it provides you with a good view of what keywords to target (and which ones to drop). It’s quite normal for ‘ideal keywords’ not to perform as well as expected and in such instances it’s often a good idea to shift focus on other keywords.

AdWords  

The AdWords analysis report is the core intention of Google – to integrate with AdWords and help advertisers get the most out of their investment, plus to help them and those who don’t use AdWords spend some more of course! Nevertheless, this is an extremely handy tool since you can measure how well AdWords campaigns convert (and whether it’s worth it to spend your precious budget on a particular AdGroup or not) and will allow you to dig deeper into this paid traffic source with the Segment option.

Campaigns  

This campaign analysis report allows you to track the online marketing/advertising campaigns that you create by using the utm_campaign custom tag. Campaign performance can be a useful high-level view of the effectiveness of your marketing initiatives. Use the Segment menu to view this traffic in different ways. It’s usually not used for AdWords, since that offers auto tagging.