Where Does Traffic Come From and How to Decipher What it Means to Your Business
Traffic, traffic, traffic ... I have spent the last 8 years caring about that 'number' each day while I was the editor of Style Unveiled ... OMG what a relief those days are over!!! I have been so excited to watch the traffic and analytics of a baby website and blog again ... of course, I'm referring to The Editor's Touch traffic and referrers .... I showed a grab of them below for the last month:
It was a huge goal for me when I ran Style Unveiled that 'direct traffic' was always the biggest and I definitely succeeded ... and I'm really happy to see that direct traffic is my biggest source again! This means that I have done my job with making my brand and name STICK and that people are typing it in or bookmarking it to their browsers ... YAY (patting my own back).
My next biggest source of traffic is Facebook ... over the years I have grown a HUGE network of wedding professional friends because I love to network and am all about relationships ... so YAY again! Also, this means people believe my blog posts have value and are sharing it to their owns feeds and pages! Yahoo!!
Seeing Google as my third referrer source really surprises me because I am a super, tiny baby ... less than 6 months old. My gut feeling is that people have heard of The Editor's Touch and are typing that in the search bar ... thus finding my website. I highly doubt I am coming up yet for any of the search terms I have set as goals.
89 clicks from Pinterest also surprises me a bit ... I rarely Pin from this site ... so that will remain a mystery to me, but I'm not complaining! ;)
Twitter sent me 14 clicks in the last 30 days ... I don't really count Twitter as an asset ... I feel like Twitter has changed to more bragging rights than anything else ... when I joined in November of 2008 it was all about the conversations you could have ... texting online for everyone to see ... now it's more of a promotion and I feel like it's too busy for people to really care.
LOVE seeing that my clients have sent me traffic - which are rooneygirlbakeshop.com and temeculaweddingplanning.com !! Honestly, I hold that traffic in very high regard ... because if people are clicking from their sites it probably means they are looking for a website designer and actively 'clicked' on my credit ... that to me is HUGE.
It really is the TYPE of traffic you receive, not the number, at least when it comes to a small business, not a national blog. If you receive 25 clicks from a DIY wedding blog because you were featured ... is that better than 5 clicks sent to you from Grace Ormonde? Probably not ... I would think the clicks from Grace Ormonde are way more qualified ...
When you look at your analytics you can break it down exactly like I did ... I recommend picking one day per month where you go in and look through your traffic referrers ... probably not necessary to do it EVERY day unless you have something massive happening that day.
Go through each referrer and determine if it led to a hiring client or a sale ... it's always interesting to compare months to the year before too! That way you can see what's still working and what isn't.
XO~ Heather