Use analytics to get insights on traffic sources

This article describes the benefits of monitoring analytics on your site to understand site performance. With Google Analytics, for example, you can dig deeper into the specific traffic sources of your site. Segmenting traffic sources allows you to report on them.

How to use analytics to see traffic source data

Using Google Analytics as an example analytics platform, you can:

• Create custom URLs to segment by the different sources. Use the URL builder to create specific URLs to use for each of your different campaigns. For example, you could create unique URLs for your newsletter, social media postings, etc.
• Instead of placing your main URL in your newsletter, use the custom URL created for that specific source. This allows you to report on these specific campaigns. You can then cross reference your analytics data with your AdSense data from URL channels on those unique campaign URLs, to see how the respective sources are performing.
• Look at the types of users coming to your site and how they are affecting your AdSense ad performance by linking your AdSense account to Analytics. If you find that one of your traffic sources is sending you a lot of traffic that's not quite your desired user base, then you can make appropriate changes.

What to look for, and what actions to take

Now that you're able to see your segmented traffic, what sort of things should you look for?

• Abnormal spikes in
  • Impressions
  • Clicks
  • CTR
  • Visited pages
• Outliers compared to other aspects in your reporting.

If you notice some of these unexpected behaviors, you can:

• Talk with your traffic source to understand where their users are coming from.
• Discontinue working with sources that aren't sending users that fit your target audience.
• Self-report invalid clicks.

In addition to uncovering unexpected behavior, you can use this data to optimize your site performance. If you notice that a particular traffic source is consistently performing better than other sources, you may want to spend more time or money, and ramp up even more traffic from that source.