The traffic sources tab of your analytics provides information on how your visitors landed on your website. This data is broken down into three categories: direct, referrals, and search.
Here’s what you can learn from each of the categories:
Direct: Direct traffic is just what it sounds like. These are the users who visited your website by entering your url directly into a web browser. Most of the time, these users will start their website journey from the homepage. The direct traffic user is valuable because these users have committed your website to memory and do not require a search tool to find it.
Referrals: This tab provides you with data on sites that link to yours and how much traffic you receive from them. Wondering if you get more traffic from Facebook or Twitter? How about that new directory listing you paid for? This tab will tell you how effective all those sites are at driving traffic to your website.
Search: The search tab provides you with information on both organic and paid search results. Google provides you with the actual search terms that are used to find your site. This information is vital to your keyword research and allows you to see what keywords you should be targeting in your content. Does one of your major keywords appear at the bottom of this list? It might be time to take a look at your content and rewrite it to include the desired keywords more prominently.
What do you think is the most important traffic source for your website?
