Increase Traffic to Your Website Using Google Analytics Acquisition Reports

Would you like to increase traffic to your website?

Of course you would!!!

There are lots of marketing strategies and campaigns you can use to increase traffic, but where do you start?

I recommend you start by using your Google Analytics Acquisition reports!

One of the unconventional ways to increase traffic to your website is to check your Google Analytics. The Acquisition reports show you how people are finding your website. When you have this data, you’ll be able to determine which traffic methods are working best, which methods need more work, and ultimately you’ll be able to increase traffic to your website.

This article covers the basics of using your Google Analytics Acquisition reports.

View Your Acquisition Reports

1. From your Google Analytics dashboard, click on Acquisition
   
2. Under Acquisitions, click on All Traffic, then Channels
   A Channels report graph appears. Adjust the dates in the upper-right corner of this report screen as needed.
3. Within the Channels report, you’ll see a list of channels that bring traffic to your website
   The channels you will see are Organic Search (visitors who found your website after searching the internet); Direct (visitors who came to your website without a traceable referral source, for example, someone going directly to your website by typing your URL into their address bar or by clicking on a saved bookmark); Paid Search (visitors who came to your website from some kind of a paid ad, such as Google Remarketing Ads); Referral (visitors who came to your website from a link on another website); Social (visitors who came to your website from a social media platform, such as Facebook); Email (visitors who came to your website through a link in an email message).
   
4. Use the data in the report to determine where the majority of your traffic is coming from
   Each channel can be clicked on for more detailed information within that channel. For example, if you click on Organic Search, you will see the Keywords report. If you click on Direct, you’ll see the top landing pages for direct visitors. If you click on Referral, you’ll see the websites that are linking to your website, and if you click on Social, you’ll see which social media platforms are sending you traffic. This report also shows you the number of Users, New Users, Sessions, Bounce Rate, Page/Session, and Average Session Duration. This information can be helpful to see how visitors are interacting with your website and how long they are visiting.
   

Tips For Using Your Data to Increase Traffic

The Google Analytics Acquisition Channels will help you determine how visitors arrived at your website. Of course knowing how much traffic each channel generates (compared to other channels) is important information, but you’ll also want to look at the Behavior and Conversion columns of data to determine the quality of the traffic as well. Once you know the most effective channel, you can focus your marketing efforts on generating more traffic through that channel.

It’s important to note that you’ll want a good balance of traffic sources to your website. For example, you don’t want all your traffic coming from Facebook. If for some reason your website was banned by Facebook, you would lose all that traffic and sales. Click on Acquisitions, then Overview to see a pie chart of your traffic sources.

Organic Search

Take a look at your report and identify which channel is bringing you the most traffic. For most people, having Organic Search in the first position is the goal. Organic Search that makes between 40-50% of your overall traffic is ideal.

If Organic Search is not in the first position (or is less than 40% of your overall traffic), then you know people are not finding your website through internet searches. If this is the case, you need to work on your product titles and product descriptions (click links for more details) to make your products easier to find in searches. Being very specific with your titles is important. Including the product titles within the first sentence or two of your description reinforces the title and makes search engines better understand the product. Better descriptions also make it easier for buyers to discover the product.

Social

Click on the Social channel to see the details of which social media platforms are sending you the most traffic. I think this data is very helpful!

If you’ve been spending a lot of time promoting your store and engaging with customers on Facebook, you’ll be able to track the number of visitors who actually clicked through to your website. This is a good indicator of the effectiveness of your posts (or lack thereof).

If you’ve been pinning products to Pinterest boards, you can gauge the effectiveness of those pins driving traffic.

If one of the social media platforms isn’t performing very well, you’ll know that you need to change the kinds of posts, or the frequency of posts, in order to obtain more traffic from that platform.

TIP: If you take a look at step 1 above, you’ll see there is a Social menu under Acquisitions. This Social menu will give you even more data than the social channel under the Channel menu.

Referral

Click on the Referral channel to see exactly which websites have linked to your store. You can drill-down even further by clicking on each Referral to see the specific pages that referred traffic. And, you can drill-down even further by clicking on those specific pages for more information.

If you find that some of your referrals are coming from blogs in your industry, you might want to follow those blogs on social media and interact with them. This a great opportunity to form relationships with these bloggers, and you never know when they might feature your store again.

If your overall Referral traffic is less than 10-20%, it means there aren’t that many websites linking to yours and you should work on link building and content marketing campaigns. Forming relationships with micro-influencers, as mentioned in the note above, will also help boost traffic from this channel.

Direct

As I mentioned above, the Direct channel shows the number of visitors who came to your website through a direct link. It’s important to note here that if you (or anyone on your team) is accessing your website regularly, the counts you see in this data might include your visits. If this is the case, you’ll want to create a filter to remove “internal traffic” from your reports. Here is a link to the Google Help Page on how to create this filter – Exclude Internal Traffic.

Email

If you are sending email marketing messages to your list, the Email channel will help you to see which pages are being clicked on from your messages. The overall count of traffic can also help you determine if your email marketing strategy is working, or not. Having conversion goals for email campaigns is another way to measure the success of your mailings (see more information about conversion goals below).

Review Reports Weekly

Watch these reports weekly (typically on the same day of each week – I review my reports on Saturday’s). If you see a drastic change in one of the traffic sources, you’ll know something is happening, so it’s best to keep an eye on these stats.

Additional Notes

Behavior and Conversions

As you have learned, knowing your traffic numbers can help guide you in the right direction to increasing traffic to your website through various channels. By the traffic numbers are just a portion of this report. You’ll also want to analyze the behavior and conversions for each channel. Click on Acquisitions, then on Overview to see this report.

The Acquisition column of data shows you the total number of visits to your website and what number and percentage of those visits were new visits. This data helps you to see which channels are attracting new visitors or repeat visitors.

The Behavior column of data shows you the bounce rate for each channel, the number of pages per visit, and the average duration of the visit. A high bounce rate means visitors are coming to your website, but then are not finding it relevant to the link they clicked on and they leave without visiting another page. The pages per visit and average visit duration can help you identify how well the users are engaged.

The Conversion column of data allows you to choose a data metric (goal) that you want to measure. In order to see data in this column, you’ll need to create at least one conversion goal (click link for the Google Analytics Help Page for creating goals).

There are many different types of goals you can create, and I’ll cover more on that in another article at a later date. You can also read more about creating goals at 4 Google Analytics Goal Types That Are Critical To Your Business. But for this article, one goal you might want to use is when a visitor adds something to their cart. I created the goal for you, all you have to do is click Add To Cart to use this Goal within your Google Analytics. (NOTE: Make sure you are logged in to your Google Analytics account before you click on the link. After you click the link, you should see the screen below. Choose your website from the “select a view” box and then click “Create”).

Another goal you might want to use is when a visitor actually completes an order. Again, I created this goal for you – just click Completes Order to use this Goal (and again, make sure you are logged in to your Google Analytics account before clicking the link).

As you can see from the data in the chart above (Acquisitions > Overview), Other is the channel that brings the most amount of traffic to this sample website, but it has a fairly low conversion rate. The Direct channel also brings a decent amount of traffic to the website, but it has a much higher conversion rate. Once you set up a conversion goal for your website, you’ll be able to use the data from that column to help you better pinpoint the most effective traffic channels to your website.

If you have more than one conversion goal, you can select the goal for the data you want to see by clicking the down-arrow at the top of the Conversions column and choosing a goal from there.

Conclusion

Armed with the data from your Acquisition Reports, you’ll be able to focus your marketing strategies and promotional campaigns accordingly to see increased traffic on the various channels you are targeting. You’ll also be able to measure their performance over time and adjust your strategies when needed.

For more marketing tips and information, click the Marketing category here on this website.

Questions?

If you have any questions about this information, please post them below and I’ll be happy to reply.