Referrals and Direct Incoming Traffic Stats: A Pop Quiz

By jmacofearth On 02/03/2013 · Add Comment

Here is my last 30-day stats from Google Analytics.

Okay, can you guess the top 6 generators of incoming traffic? (My guess is your traffic patterns are similar.)

#1 at a whopping 34% (797) is ***

#2 at 25.5% (591)

#3 generating 11.6% (269)

#4 at 5% (113)

#5 is 4.2% (98) is my RSS feed.

#6 is 2.7% (63)

And here they are in scrambled order. #3 is LinkedIN my favorite professional referral platform; #6 is Google+; #4 is Twitter; #2 is Google Organic search; #1 is "direct". What the heck is direct anyway?

Direct traffic definition from Google's Support Page:

The information in this report lets you see which of your URLs are the most popular destinations for direct traffic: which URLs people can easily remember (e.g., google.com), which addresses appear most often in auto-completion, or which of your pages are bookmarked the most.

So part of the "direct" traffic is people clicking on auto-completions when they are entering your domain in google. And also book marks or links that are shared with others via email.

In the also-ran section are the other social media networks: Google.com (referral), Facebook (referral), StumbleUpon, Yahoo Organic, Bing Organic, Reddit. And still amazing to me, DIGG is ZERO. And I Digg everything I do. As if it's some superstitious thing. But Zero traffic! Wow, how the mighty have fallen.

So the quick lesson here is:

1. LinkedIn rocks.

2. Organic Search (SEO) is very important.

3. Direct links still drive the majority of the traffic to uber.la.

I need to do a deep dive on who is linking and where they are going. Google Analytics gives us Landing Page data, but that's not much to go on when trying to find where the inbound links came from.

Keep It Social Out There!(tm)

@jmacofearth (also seen on Google+: jmacofearth)
permalink: http://uber.la/2013/02/referrals-traffic/

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