Understanding your Google Analytics Digital Traffic

Yes I know we all want to understand our Digital Traffic so we can understand our website audience better which will eventually help us take better actions.

So let's start by understanding the Google Analytics Structure.

The basic structure of any google analytics accounts is the same.

Account > Property > View

The Account:

The account level is the highest level in the GA (Google Analytics) structure and sits at the top of the pyramid as shown in the above hierarchy structure.

The Property:

The property level is the second level in GA (Google Analytics) and represents the entity linked to a single tracking code. Each Analytics account can have up to 50 properties. By default, in any Analytics account, there will be at least one property but you can create more properties.

The View:

The view is the last level of hierarchy in GA (Google Analytics), consider it to be the subset of an individual property which has its configurations, settings, and defined data within the property. Each property can have to 25 views. You can have more than one view for a property, and use filters to create different report views for the property.

Permissions

You can grant different users different view permissions (Manage Users, Edit, Collaborate, Read & Analyze) on:

• An Analytics account
• A Property under an Analytics account
• A View under a property

Understanding Traffic

In order to understand your website traffic you need to first and foremost understand two things;

1. Understanding the default settings that are there whenever you start using Google Analytics.
2. Understanding Customizations including custom filters that can be done.

In the basic view you will find the following;

Source

Every referral to a web site will have a source. Possible sources include: “google” (search engine), “facebook.com” (social), “Yourcompany_newsletter” (Your newsletters), and “direct” (users that typed your URL directly into their browser and visited your website)

Medium

Every referral to a website will also have a medium. A medium can includes “organic” (non-paid search traffic), “CPC” (cost per click, i.e. paid search traffic), “referral” (referral), “email” (the name of a custom medium that you may have created), “none” (direct traffic has a medium of “none” because there is none).

Keyword

The keyword that will have the value (not provided) will be when SSL search is employed, the

1. Direct Traffic 

As the name implies Direct traffic is the traffic that you get directly to your website from the URL. There are various possibilities :

1. Visitor directly types the URL in the browser and visits your site.
2. Visitor clicks on the link to the website URL through certain non-digital channels like any PDF, PPT or any other document (and if it is not UTL tagged)
3. Visitor clicks the link through their bookmark.
4. From URL shorteners untagged.

Direct traffic can be very helpful in understanding how many users actually remember your website because this is basically free traffic that is coming on your website.

You, of course, need to create enough brand awareness of your site that people directly come to your site by typing in their browsers.

You will need to analyze to which specific page the visitors are coming on the website.

Let’s say you manage a news site with different sections (eg Business, Sports, Current Affairs etc). Someone may have bookmarked any blog post you did earlier within the Sports section. Understanding direct traffic can help you understand where the visitors are coming to or basically what on the website is getting traction (but most of the traffic will still come to your home page in most of the cases)

Direct traffic can be an identifier of strong brand value.

What direct traffic can indicate:

a. Repeat Customers/Visitors (Shows loyalty of users - helps you calculate how well the brand is perceived in consumer's eyes that you are in their consideration)

b. Offline marketing campaign ( eg — TV, Radio or any Magazine ad) or they may have seen your digital ad but did not take any action at that time but later on types your URL to check out the latest sale collection.)

c. Visits from some of the untracked sources.

2. Referral Traffic 

This is any traffic that you get from any of the digital referrals. This is the traffic that comes to your sites from other sites.

Referral traffic = Who is sending that traffic?

(You may have collaborated with any other website or and you are getting some traffic from these resources)

Analyzing traffic is important so you can understand what is working and what is not working for you.

Source section in Analytics dashboard can be helpful in identifying all planned traffic as well as the unexpected ones. Let’s say you get a mention in a review website of fashion of your latest collection or another blog post and that maybe the unexpected source of traffic that you never made an effort for or was not in your plan.

Referral traffic can be helpful for :

Attracting traffic from where your audience is present it can be any industry-specific website or blogs.

3. Search Traffic

Traffic coming from any search engine goes within the Search Traffic bucket. It is not just google :)

This would include the Paid campaign searches as well as Organic (non-paid) searches from the search engines.

This is very helpful as it provides valuable information on what search queries people are searching on search engines to find you or any of your product. which are leading to the people land on your website.

Whenever you are analyzing the search traffic, be sure to learn more about the brand their consumer journey, what are those keywords that are bringing in the traffic to the website.

4. Campaign

You can also uniquely identify your paid or any engagement activities outside your website where you are bringing the audience to your site. The campaign is the name of the referrer, for instance, Facebook Ads campaign or any custom campaign that you have created to check its performance.

You can use Custom Campaigns to tag links to use your own custom values for Campaign, Medium, Source, and Keyword that will help you clearly understand which of your campaign or activity is performing better.

If you are parallel running two campaigns on multiple platforms then you will need to develop a proper structure that will help you clearly distinguish between these campaigns. Ideally, you will have to develop certain naming conventions here. There are plenty of UTM creators freely available there that will help you.

Any Content identifies a specific link or content item in a custom campaign from the URL.

For example, if you have different CTA links within the same email campaign or same emailer, you can use a different Content identifier to differentiate them so that you can tell which version is giving better results.

Every Traffic coming to your site or the quantitative measure of the visitors coming to the website can be categorised in four subsets:

Conclusion

I will share more details in my next Blog of Google Analytics. For more information, I will recommend you guys to check cxl.com for more useful Google Analytics stuff.