Determining Your Best Sources of Traffic

Do you think of traffic as just coming in one flavour? Any traffic to your website is good traffic right? Not always. Sometimes the traffic coming to your website isn’t doing you any favours in terms of giving you additional readers, subscribers, customers, whatever your website’s primary purpose is.

The analytical measurement of bounce rate describes one of the most remarkable affects on your website – keeping visitors on your site and getting them to do what you want them to do.

A Quick Refresher: For those who haven’t been following my previous posts on this topic, your bounce rate is a measure of how many people visit your site, then leave immediately without clicking on a single thing. Commonly, those who don’t pay attention to it lose 80% of their visitors before they’ve even had a chance to say “hello”. Those who are smart and pay attention in the right ways can bring that number way down low (tip: sign up for my newsletter over there on the right and I’ll send you an eBook with a case study on how to lower your bounce rate).

How to Find Out Your Best Sources of Traffic

To figure out who is sending your site the most quality traffic you first have to be measuring your website’s visitors by using Google Analytics. Read my article on measuring your bounce rate statistics to get started.

Once you’re setup and have been running Google Analytics for a little while you’ll be able to check the sources of traffic over a period of time. It’s under the menu Traffic Sources > All Traffic Sources.

What you want to do now is add an Advanced Filter.

Using An Advanced Filter

Not many people look much further than their dashboard page in Google Analytics which is a shame. It can be a really powerful and insightful tool when you know how to use it.

Advanced filters allow you to narrow down large amounts of data to provide you with meaningful, accurate statistics. It’s best to select a few month’s worth of data to build up your data set, this will give you more accuracy.

Scroll to the bottom of the list and click on the advanced filter link which will open up a new section where you can add all sorts of constrictive filters to your list.

Advanced Filtering Your Bounce Rate Statistics

The Advanced Filter should constrict your Bounce Rate to what you deem to be the maximum acceptable (it may not be where your average is at right now, but think of it as a goal to work towards), and just to filter out all the 1′s and 2′s that trickle through from site we’ll filter sites that sent more than 5 visitors. If your blog receives a lot of traffic (lucky you), just bump this up to some meaningful value.

The idea is to get about 10 traffic sources that bring you high quality traffic (as in, they send visitors that have a bounce rate in an acceptable range to you). This gives you a list of traffic partners that you should work on building a relationship with.

Link to them, leave comments, write guest posts, and do all the regular traffic building strategies you read about on every blog around the net.

Summing Up

I hope this post has been helpful to you in finding who your best traffic sources are. If you liked this article please share it around with your buddies or better yet, write a blog post on your own blog describing who your best traffic sources are and reference this article encouraging others to do the same!

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