Where Are My Leads Coming From?
You’re doing a mix of marketing and advertising, and you’re getting some traction. But how do you know what’s working, and what’s not?
Is it Yellow Pages, GoldBook, Facebook, Google Ads, or SEO getting you leads?
Welcome to the 3rd installment in the analytics blog series I’m putting together to help business owners understand the most important part of how to evaluate their different mdoes of marketing.
It is important that you know what is making you money and what isn’t. That’s what it’s all about!
We are going to use the information we learned in previous blogs to add to today’s discussion. It’s all focused around the Traffic Sources part of the Google Analytics menu- today, the direct traffic.
What Does it all Mean?
Direct Traffic
These are people who know your website address and type it right into their browser (not into Google, but into the address bar on their browser). Or they may have arrived directly to your website from clicking on a link from an email you or someone else sent them (especially if they receive email in a program like Outlook)
In this example about 15% of all people who visited the website came directly. The key stats we discussed last time need to be looked at again:
- Pages / Visit
- In this case over 3 pages is good.
- Avg. Visit Duration
- Over 2 minutes is good, just a tad lower than the site average
- Bounce Rate
- 44% isn’t scary, but 20% worse than the site average
Don’t Make this Mistake: Staff Should not Have the Company Site as a Home Page
If staff have the company website as the “home page” of their browser, it can distort the statistics. Here’s what happens:
- Staff opens their browser (perhaps multiple times a day)
- The company’s website opens
- Staff person actually wants to visit Google or another website and leaves the company website immediately
I HIGHLY advise that staff do NOT have the company’s website as their homepage for this reason. Google does not like to see a high bounce rate on a site either, so you might as well do what you can to keep that giant happy too!
Email Campaigns Can Sometimes Distort Stats
If you sent an email blast, people will often visit the site more quickly and perhaps bounce away. You can get clues about this from seeing which pages they visited on the site – and compare that to which pages were provided as links in the email campaign.
Quite often the statistics from direct traffic are more favourable than other visits to the site because it’s typically people who know and love you already.
Next on the traffic list is referrals. Learn what they are and how to interpret the data in our upcoming post.
If you’re keen to do more reading before the next post, download a FREE copy of our E-book:
