One of the most insightful aspects of digital marketing is the ability to understand exactly how customers are finding you. This vital element of Google Analytics allows you to determine which marketing efforts are working and what needs to be revised. Google Analytics will enable you to hone in on the performance of different marketing channels to evaluate everything from SEO performance to email marketing.
- Direct: These are visits in which users have navigated directly to the URL by:
1. Typing in the domain directly to the URL bar
2. Clicking on a bookmark
3. Clicking on a link in an email which isn’t tagged using tracking parameters
4. Clicking on a link in a mobile messaging app
5. Organic Search: These are visits from organic (unpaid) search results. Month on month and year on year increases to organic traffic represents a strong SEO strategy. The results of this report are determined by the medium of organic traffic such as Google, Bing, or Yahoo.
- Social: Visits from social platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.)
- Email: Traffic from tagged links clicked in email messages, whether mass email marketing or individual messages. You can add a tracking link to the URLs in your emails by using Google’s URL Builder tool. You can further segment this traffic by ‘campaign’ if you have tagged your links. This way you can see which email campaign(s) were the most successful over some time.
- Referral: Traffic coming from users clicking a link from another site, excluding significant search engines.
- Paid Search: Traffic from PPC (pay-per-click) campaigns such as Google AdWords. You can also link your AdWords campaign to Analytics for more efficient reporting within Analytics, under Acquisition.
- Other Traffic: Google defines “other traffic” as traffic coming from online advertising outside of search and display, such as cost-per-view video advertising.
- Display: Indicates traffic from display advertising, such as Google AdWords Remarketing campaigns.