Skip to main content

Google Analytics provides metrics of your traffic under the Traffic Report on the left side menu. The Traffic Source Overview provides you with an overview of the different kinds of sources that send traffic to your site. The graph shows traffic trends; the pie chart and tables show the traffic sources driving the trends. “Direct Traffic” is visits from people who clicked a bookmark to come to your site or who typed your site URL directly into their browser. “Referring Sites” shows visits from people who clicked to your site from another site. “Search Engines” shows visits from people who clicked to your site from a search engine result.

In this section of the report you’ll also see top keywords which have driven traffic to your website. Drilling down further on the Keyword Report section, you can analyze in greater detail all the keywords that drive traffic to your site. In this report you can also select a metric from the pull-down menu, just above the list of keywords to gain insight into the segments by search engine (source) or any factor you select from the pull down menu. Use the pull down menu to segment referrals for keywords by city, visitor type, language type, browser type, landing pages or other marketing segmented factors. From this information you can learn:

  • What keywords are bringing users to the site
  • What landing pages those keywords are bringing users to
  • What source is directing traffic through those keywords (Google, Yahoo, Bing, PPC Campaign etc.)
  • How qualified the traffic is that is coming from those keywords

There are many things this information can tell you, such as:

  • Conversion Process: To see what stage of the buying process users are at when they reach a certain page. Longer, multi-keyword phrases usually denote a readiness to buy/convert whereas shorter search phrases typically indicate a research phase.
  • Traffic Quality Evaluation: If you’re drawing qualified traffic in through keywords that you’ve optimized for, but are not converting or continuing to have a high bounce rate, you could be going after the wrong keywords.
  • Webpage Usability: Once you know what keywords visitors are using to arrive on your site, you can modify or amend the pages to fit their goals and searches.
  • Keyword Considerations: There could be keywords that you never thought of in this list. Take them into account when deciding how to further optimize a page or whether to add a new page.

You can use this data to target keywords that will result in higher conversions. You should be able to tweak your content on the website and inbound links to allow for specific targeting of more effective keywords. The keywords report can then be used in evaluation of your SEO efforts and performance.

If visitors coming in on a certain keyword are generating high bounce rates this could mean that the content of your web page is not connecting with the searcher’s want or need. See our previous post on bounce rates. You would then take action to ensure the webpage content is made more relevant for that keyword to reduce bounce rates and increase conversion.

The Keyword Report can also determine which words are associated with your company or product / service offering. If certain keywords are considered irrelevant, marketing efforts can be directed to disconnect with these keywords and focus on more relevant ones. This is especially important to see which words searchers associate with your company rather than just going with your personal “gut feel.” In this way, the Keyword Reports help you make more informed marketing decisions based on hard data rather than speculation.

Please visit our website if you are interested in more in-depth Google Web Analytics training.