When you own a website that you put a lot of work into, you’re probably curious about who is visiting it. You’d like to know what their favorite colors are, how much money they make, and how much of it they’re willing to hand over to you.

I can’t really help you there, and neither can Google Analytics.

But Google Analytics does do a good job of grouping people into neat groups, and that can tell you quite a bit about who they are and what they’re looking for and how you can target them.

They are:

1. Referral Traffic: This is probably where you’ll start getting the first visitors to your site. Referral traffic occurs when one website links to your site and someone clicks on that link. Think of referral traffic as an endorsement—being as we are in an election year. When one candidate (who has a lot of supporters) goes up on the lectern and decides to endorse another, lesser-known candidate that is up for election, the goal is to get some of those followers to vote for this new guy.
   Same thing with your site: when another site links to you they’re basically saying to their readers “I support this candidate.” Which is great because when you’re starting out nobody knows you and getting endorsements from sites with traffic is a great way of getting people to your own site.
2. Search Traffic: You’ve probably heard a lot about this one. I’m sure you’ve heard words like SEO, Google, and PageRank. Let’s not worry about all of that just yet. All you need to know now is that this type of traffic got to your site by searching for something in a search engine and your site came up somewhere in the results. The user felt it was relevant enough and they went ahead and clicked on it. The best part bout this traffic is that it’s free and requires very little continuous work on your part. If you’re a photographer in New York that takes pictures of infants and you specialize in black and white portraits, ideally you’re showing up when someone searches for “black and white kids portrait nyc.” There are tons of things you can do to help with how high up you rank on a search, but that’s for a later post. If you want to read more on SEO, you can check out the guides on the right or you can read the post on Off Page SEO, which incidentally has a lot to do with referral traffic.
3. Direct Traffic: This is traffic that comes straight to your site. Someone either typed in your URL into their address bar or they clicked on a bookmark to get to your site. Either way, this tells us a few things about this kind of visitor: a) they already know about your site and b) they went straight to it without any help from a search engine or endorsement from another site. This won’t be very high at first (as long as you’ve blocked yourself from your Analytics!) because nobody knows about you or your site. And if your site’s URL is something wacky like www.plsecomeandvisitpleeeaaaase.com then good luck getting any traffic at all, especially of the direct variety.
4. Other: Ah, the catch-all, ambiguous bucket known as “other.” What’s included here? Everything else, obviously, but to be a little more specific let’s mention e-mail. You may not have an email list or send any email to people, but you may eventually, and this is where it would show up. Also, if you’ve placed your URL in the signature of your email client and you send a lot of email, you might see a trickle come in through here. Whenever someone clicks on a link to your site from their Yahoo, G-Mail, Outlook, etc., then this is where the traffic will be logged.

The reason I ordered these sections as I did was because that’s pretty much how you should expect to see the traffic come in when you first start out. Hopefully you’re out there networking with other sites or people who have sites that are relevant to yours and they like your site enough to endorse you.

And if you have friends with totally unrelated websites, feel free to go ahead and ask them to mention your site, along with the ever-important link. The traffic isn’t as important (especially since it won’t be relevant to all those visitors), but the link is. We’ll cover this later, but links are the currency of the web, and the more you have, the better your site will be viewed by search engines like Google.

After all, the more quality endorsements a candidate has, the better his/her odds are of winning an election.

On a future post we’ll look at how to go beyond counting how many people from each group you’re getting and starting digging into some of the deeper stuff like whether or not the traffic is relevant to your site. The last thing you want to do is drive a ton of pottery fanatics to your photography site…unless you can create a cool angle that makes it relevant to them.

How to Take Awesome Pottery Pictures?

Anything’s possible.

Image by TheBigTouffe

Wouldn’t it be great if you could see how many people visit your site every day? All those tweaks and changes you’re making day after day: does anyone care? Is it working?

Well there is a way to find out, and it won’t cost you a thing.

It’s called Google Analytics and it’s the most popular web-analytics tool out there. It’s powerful, it’s easy to install, and it’s free. It’s so great that a lot of companies use it as their web-analytics tool, and they rely on the traffic information it gives them to make crucial decisions involving millions of dollars.

And all you need to do to get it set up is install a teeny bit of harmless code on each page of your site—it’s very easy.

So I’m sure it’ll be good enough for you and your website.

Install it on your site and the next day you’ll be able to track a whole bunch of cool stuff. Things like:

• Number of people are coming to your site
• The most popular pages
• How long they are hanging out for
• Where they are coming from
• What they are searching for on the web that takes them to your site

The amount of stuff GA tells you about your site is pretty amazing, especially since it’s free.

If you aren’t tech savvy and don’t want to worry about code and where to put it, don’t worry about it, just email your “tech guy” or whoever it is that’s running your site and tell them you want to get it up and running. They should know what to do.

All you need to do is visit Google Analytics and create a Google Account. From there you’ll answer a few questions and eventually Google will give you a tiny bit of code that is customized for your site. Send that to your Tech person and tell him you need this code “on every single page just before the </head> tag.” He should know what to do.

The next day you’ll have access to GA anywhere you have Internet access. The first time you log in, you’re going to pull a Neo and go “Whoa!”

Trust me, when you see everything that’s in there, you’re going to feel overwhelmed. It’s like popping the hood of your car and being asked to point out the differential flange.

Worry not: that’s what this site is for. It’s aimed at people who don’t know anything about GA and want to make their sites better by generating more qualified traffic (more on that later) and being more efficient.

Google Analytics can be very overwhelming for the beginner, so make sure to bookmark Applied Analytics. I will walk you through everything you need to know. And if you’ve already installed it and have specific questions, feel free to send them along.

Image by SMJJP