20. Where does your traffic come from? — 30 Days Of Medium
Welcome back to 30 Days Of Medium.
Thanks to everyone who has been reading, clapping and commenting so far! Today’s topic is — Where does your traffic come from?
You can catch up on the first 19 days of my 30 Days Of Medium challenge below if you missed them:
0. 30 Days Of Medium
1. What do you need to build your own website? — 30 Days Of Medium
2. How to find a business you love — 30 Days Of Medium
3. How to build your own website — 30 Days Of Medium
4. How to measure your website’s performance — 30 Days Of Medium
5. How to get more customers by answering their questions -30 Days Of Medium
6. The successful business website cheat sheet — 30 Days Of Medium
7. How to measure success — 30 Days Of Medium
8. Understanding the Online Sales Funnel — 30 Days Of Medium
9. What is traffic and why is it important? — 30 Days Of Medium
10. What is Google URL Builder and why should you use it? — 30 Days Of Medium
11. Double your traffic by automating your social media schedule — 30 Days Of Medium
12. How to tell what sells — 30 Days Of Medium
13. How I grew my Medium following 6,500% — 30 Days Of Medium
14. How you look at things matters — 30 Days Of Medium
15. How to SELL services to small businesses — 30 Days Of Medium
16. How to win more deals with effective proposals — 30 Days Of Medium
17. How to setup an online store in 10 minutes — 30 Days Of Medium
18. How to work from anywhere — 30 Days Of Medium
19. Why your website is sabotaging your sales — 30 Days Of Medium
20. Where does your traffic come from? — 30 Days Of Medium
21. How to actually recognise burnout — 30 Days Of Medium
22. How to hack your schedule and get twice as much done — 30 Days Of Medium
23. Don’t copy your competitors — 30 Days Of Medium
24. How to SEO optimise a blog post — 30 Days Of Medium
25. Be unique or be forgotten — 30 Days Of Medium
26. Going with your gut — 30 Days Of Medium
27. People don’t pay for average — 30 Days Of Medium
28. How to do keyword research — 30 Days Of Medium
29. Why The Pareto Principle is the world’s biggest hack — 30 Days Of Medium
30. Your content is more profitable than your telephone — 30 Days Of Medium
Start by tracking your traffic
If you’re not sure what traffic is, read this.
9. What is traffic and why is it important? — 30 Days Of Medium
Tracking your traffic is the only way to know where your traffic comes from. (duh).
If you want to know where your traffic comes from, and you should, there are a few things you should do.
- Install Google Analytics
2. Connect Google Analytics to Google Webmaster Tools
Figuring out where your traffic comes from
Now that you’ve done the easy bit, let’s drill down into where your traffic actually comes from.
To do this, we’re going to use two reports in Google Analytics.
The first report is the Acquisition Overview Report.
To access this, follow these steps:
- Log into Google Analytics
- Click on Acquisition
- Click on Overview
Your acquisition overview gives you a top down summary of where the traffic comes from.
- Organic Search
- Referral
- Direct
- Social
- Other
This is super super useful and probably the most useful thing you’ll get out of Google Analytics, besides understanding your unique visitors and bounce rate metrics.
For instance, if you know you’re getting no traffic from Organic Search you know your SEO sucks, or you have no content drawing in traffic.
The second report is the Search Console Landing Pages Report.
To access this report, follow these steps:
- Log into Google Analytics
- Click on Acquisition
- Click on Search Console
- Click on Landing Pages
This report gives you specific detail on which pages people land on when they visit your website.
This is super useful for figuring out which content is effective atdrawing in people from search engines.
Years ago Google made it difficult to drill down into your organic search traffic but this little hack will help you connect some of the dots.
If you know that your latest article is getting 50 hits a month from Google, you can write more content like that, further SEO optimise that article, or build links to that article if it still isn’t in the top spot for its search term.
Why is this useful?
It’s incredibly useful to know where your traffic comes from.
Without this knowledge, you can’t improve.
If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.
As I talked about in my article Understanding The Online Sales Funnel, you need good traffic to get good leads to get sales.
Traffic is everything.
It’s the top of the funnel. The start of your marketing process at attracting and closing new customers.
If your target is to generate x amount of new revenue you can’t do this until you know your metrics.
If you’re currently getting 50% below your target amount of revenue, you need to double your traffic, to double your leads, to double your sales.
Or, you need to get creative with your conversion rates and do a lot more with the traffic you currently have.
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