Know Where Your Traffic Is Coming From

Traffic Acquisition Channels - If you have been promoting your blog on social media and want to know how much traffic that is bringing in to your site, or if you simply want to know where your web traffic is coming from, you can use the Google Analytics "Acquisition" reports to find out this information.

The Acquisition reports can give you information about where your web traffic is coming from. Are most of them coming from organic searches or referrals? Affiliate links? Through social media? The Acquisitions report can also give you an insight into which specific social networks are bringing in the most viewers. You can also track Google Ads and Search Console (if they are linked to your site) through the Acquisition reports, but this we'll cover later on in the semester.

To access the Acquisition reports, click on "Acquisition" on the left-hand menu.

In the "Overview" section, Google Analytics will provide you with a broad analysis of your acquisition channels, number of users, number of conversions, and a breakdown of acquisition, behavior, and conversions per channel.

In the example above, we can see that for the week of October 18 to October 24, there was a total of 7 users. Of these users, 42.9% came from a social channel and 57.1% came from a direct channel. We also have a snapshot at the bounce rate from each source, as well as conversions based on your set goals (read Set Goals in Google Analytics to learn how to set goals on Google Analytics).

To know exactly where your traffic is coming from, go to "All Traffic" under Acquisition. This section can give you information about the channels that are sending traffic to your site (direct or social), as well as being able to look at the specific source/medium and any referrals your page has gotten.

In this instance, we will take a closer look at the "Referrals" report.

I have adjusted the time range to reflect the entirety of the blog's existence. The report shows the different sources from which my site has acquired traffic. The information is then categorized by three sections: acquisition, behavior, and conversions.

Another efficient way to look at this information is by arranging the data by "percentage." This will present the information in a pie chart to help you look at the ratios of where your traffic is coming from.

From the list of sources, we can see that most traffic comes from Facebook (where I share links to my blog posts), followed by Blogger. There are also two users that have come from another blog (jehrmanmktg345.blogspot.com) and Google+.

You can also choose to have this information displayed in a bar chart to look at performance, a comparative bar chart to look at where each source stacks next to one another, as a wordmap, and in a pivot table.