By Elmer on January 25, 2010

As web designers, we hope that we don’t just build websites for the sake of having one. We also aim to ensure that these websites are also easily accessible to those who find them, and not simply a white elephant sitting in the corner visible only to people who know us and not to those looking for us. Obviously, we need tools to find out if we achieve these objectives. We can accomplish such by installing web analytics tools, notably Google Analytics.

Once our Google Analytics installation is up and running, we can immediately check where our visitors are coming from. Are they coming from people who type our website URL, a link from another website or a website identified as search engines?

Direct Traffic
This type of traffic refers to visitors who directly type your website (i.e., going to your favorite browser and type the URL), follow an email link in email client such as Outlook or Lotus Notes (are there still people using this one?) or clicking on a browser’s bookmarked website. The good thing about this is that if people type in our website address or access our site through bookmarks or EDM campaigns, they are aware of our website and there is no need to pass through another channel. These types of visitors possibly have higher loyalty and better brand awareness, something we also are aiming for. Another reason could be that our website URL is often visible on offline advertising channels such as magazines, TV commercials or outdoor billboards. As we’re clueless every direct traffic visitor is from, we can only speculate that they are coming from possible sources above.

Referring Sites
Referring sites refer to visitors who come from external sites (directories, blogs or simply pages on a website that link to any tracked page within our website). The more popular these web pages where links to our pages are found, the more visitors they refer. That is why it’s only reasonable to place an ad within a website that draws thousands of visitors, instead of going with an obscure website. If we want to improve the number of visitors from this channel, our website needs to have unique, relevant and interesting pages so that many websites will link to them for reference. In turn, people who access those sites would be able to visit our website through those links.

Search Engines
Search engines refer to visitors coming from Google, Yahoo!, Bing, Baidu and other websites identified as search engines (you can also add a new search engine). They are the type of visitors who are looking for something on the Web but have no idea where to find them, so they use search engines to accomplish the task. In most cases, these are visitors who are not aware of our website until they found it within search engine results. This means, that it’s likely to get a new visitor into our site if they come from search engines. In order to attract visitors coming from search engines, our websites must comply with search engine guidelines in order for search engines to easily access our pages. Not only that our website should have a good amount of content about the theme of the site.

By understanding these traffic source, and identifying what type of visitors we can expect from each of the three channels I describe above, hopefully we can easily differentiate one from another, determine which is most important for our website so we can explore opportunities to improve visitor traffic.

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