Last week we analyzed the “Visitors” component of Analytics, using real data from our blog. This post will do the same with”Traffic Sources.” We’ll look at who sent our readers here and how they behaved once they crossed the threshold. You may want to quickly skim or re-read Analytics Part 1, then follow along with your own Statistics in a separate browser window.
Bird’s Eye View of Traffic
Login to Google Analytics, view your blog’s report and then press “Traffic Sources” to expand the side bar. Here’s the famous pie chart breaking down the three components: 55% search engine, 27% other blogs/forums/sites and 17% direct link from email or RSS readers.
There’s also a bird’s eye view of the “Top 5″ traffic sources and keyword searches, with links to full reports. 
During this brief time period we saw Google as the major search engine (50% versus Yahoo at 3%). BlogCatalog and SU were the top referring sites.
As for keywords, we see in the top 5 that 42 visits came from the first search on “how to make a logo for free” and 13 from the 5th one on the list, “how to make logos free.”
Other overviews:
Let’s press each of the three buttons underneath Traffic Overview to see how visitor types behaved.
- “Direct Traffic“ – Stayed an avg of 2 minutes, viewed 1.7 pages and bounced at a rate of 75%. These visitors were mostly ‘new’. This is to be expected since our RSS rate was growing during that period.
- “Referring Sites” – Remained 2.5 minutes, read nearly 2 pages and had a 63% bounce rate. The most targeted referrals were from BlogCatlog, Bloggeries and John Chow.
- “Search Engines” – Stayed 1.5 minutes on 1.5 pages bouncing 74%. Folks from Bing and AOL stayed and explored longer.
Drill Down Views of Traffic – Splice a dimension
Going beyond the summaries, you can see a lot more using the dimensions bar. This is a real scroll bar — move the vertical bar down to see the full set of choices)
On your Analytics, select the “landing page” dimension. We’ll do that for Direct, Referring Sites and Search Engine components to see what pops out in the spliced dimension. In all examples, we exclude the home page (“/”), round numbers and compile results for two top landing pages:
| Splice | Landing Page |
Visits |
Pages |
Time |
% New |
Bounce |
| DIRECT | /grab-button-advertise-blog | 21 | 1.3 | 02:39 | 66.7% | 76% |
| /50-must-have-wordpress-plugins | 23 | 1.4 | 01:26 | 43.5% | 87% | |
| REFERRING | /grab-button-advertise-blog | 84 | 1.8 | 02:54 | 67.9% | 54% |
| /50-must-have-wordpress-plugins | 16 | 2.0 | 02:45 | 63.5% | 44% | |
| SEARCH | /grab-button-advertise-blog | 93 | 2.0 | 03:11 | 74.% | 57% |
| /50-must-have-wordpress-plugins | 96 | 1.5 | 01:36 | 72% | 77% |
The table shows how different traffic sources impact each post. Armed with that information, we can tweak/stroke the better sources and promote related topics there. Both posts perform about equally with direct traffic. However newer visitors spend more time on ‘grab button’ since it’s a tutorial.
- /50-must-have-wordpress-plugins
—- performs well with Referring traffic, however the volume is relatively low. We could put more effort into referring traffic to increase the visits. See part 3 for ways to find who is referring the current traffic for this post and where visitors navigated after landing there.
—- best performance comes from searches, with same time on site, but lower bounce rate. We could maximize visits by looking more closely at search keywords to see if more related posts make visitors stick even longer. - /grab-button-advertise-blog
—Good performance with Referring, but best on Searches. Very high time on site and lowest bounce rate. What would you do to further promote this post? To share it’s ‘juice’ with other worthy posts?
Call to Action:
“Basically statistics can help you know more about your visitors and your strengths. If you’re weak on certain areas, then create a plan to fix it. Blog statistics serve as a light for you to pass through the darkness in the blogosphere.”- Fransiska in her post about getting the most from stats.
- Review your traffic stats and see where you need to improve.
- Write a post about any light this review casts for you and your action plan.
- Leave a comment on any other articles that helped you understanding Analytic.
This series helps you ask questions as you analyze your blog’s visitor metrics. In the next part, we’ll look more closely at views for Content. Don’t forget to subscribe! Happy Analytics dimension splicing …
SBA is a web designer and co-founder of BloggingWithSuccess.net. She publishes 
varun (9)
Creative Junkie (5)
Gabe | freebloghe... (5)
George Serradinho (4)
Ruchi (4)
{ 2 trackbacks }
{ 10 comments… read them below or add one }
nice, to see that you get more than 50% of traffic from google.
We’re happy about that — shows our work is paying off. By the way where is your gravatar — has the blue monster grabbed it? get one at gravatar.com. thanks for visiting.
Nice post. Recently I’ve got PR 1 and I see on my Goolge Analytics that my traffic from google is about 11%. My blog is just about 3 months. I just want to ask this: Is PR have a relations with my traffic from Google?
PR1 after 3 months is quite good! What you need to know is that PR helps your page/blog appear higher in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). So if I search for one of your main keywords like
“blogging tips” which you have in your description and within your posts/categories/tags, then your blog is probably on my SERP. However, it probably not on the first 5 or 6 pages and I’m not going through all of them! This is the key relationship with Google traffic. SEO optimization is another way to bring google traffic but that’s a different post!
Nice tips, search engine hits are usually the best visits. You have somebody that is staying on your site if you have what they are looking for, and that is how you actually earn the money.
Thanks for your observations. Now if only the ‘earning’ part catches up. lol I like your stationary side design. Looks like the Twitter bird is flying… Some widgets are hard to read but you can have a larger margin from the side design and less space next to the middle column. Talk with the template support area.
Hi,
We are pleased to confer upon you the “Friendship Chain” award. For more visit our site link.
From the desk of the iW2K team
Many thanks for considering our blog.
This post has taught me a great deal. I use some of the details above, but not all. I guess I have to start using it more and more to find out about this.
George, it’ll be worth your time — questions will come to mind and cause you to set goals. Using analytics you can see if your action plans make a difference.