How do I find out the source of traffic?

Internet traffic is nothing more than the sum of all visitors to a web resource. To date, everything is arranged so that traffic is the key to the profitability of the project. Different traffic can bring different money, but one is unchanged: it always needs more than there is at the moment. We will try to highlight the topic of attendance in the most detailed manner, answering all the main questions that arise about the traffic of novice webmasters.

Traffic sources

Traffic can not be created from nothing, just like you can not simply take and print money. Visitors need to be drawn from other, larger sources that have already won their own audience. Let's find out what sources of traffic exist for today:

• search engines;
• social networks;
• Mobile messengers;
• Bookmarks in the browser;
• Portals and forums;
• Offline advertising;
• Online advertising;
• Other sources.

It is noteworthy that you need to determine the way to further monetize your project on the Internet in order to choose the necessary growth strategy for attendance. If you are planning to make money on sales, then you will need any source of traffic, including advertising. But for content sites this is not cost-effective, because their business model implies earnings on the sale of advertising, and reselling traffic at a higher price is another story altogether. Therefore, we first look at free traffic sources.

How to get visitors free of charge

Go from one web resource to another Internet user can by the link found, or using the search engine. Both options offer an abundance of free ways to get traffic. Next, we give the basic examples of obtaining traffic from the largest sources:

1. Search Engines. To get to the top of the search engine it's easiest to choose a special semantic core of search queries. Under these requests, you will need to write articles that will be targeted to a specific key.
2. Social like "Vkontakte" and "Facebook" allow you to create public interest groups. Filling out the group's data with interesting content and leaving a link to it in other public places, you can dial subscribers who can then be turned into the audience of your portal.
3. Messengers for mobile devices support the function of chat bots. You can create some bot with unusual answers, and people will skip each other links to it. So you get an audience that you can then convert to traffic to your site.
4. If you already have high attendance values from various sources, work on making people bookmark your site and visit it regularly.
5. Portals of interest, such as "Pikabu" or "Habrahabr", have a sufficiently solvent audience. If you recommend yourself there, you can quietly advertise your site or product.
6. People still go out and look at bigboards. This method of advertising works well on a large scale of the advertising budget.
7. Online advertising has many varieties, and it is better to entrust it to a professional, explaining in detail its goals and objectives.

New traffic sources

A new source of traffic for your portal can be, for example, traffic from mobile applications.

Visitors to the online store can be attracted using utilities such as "Yandex.Market", which show the user shops with the lowest prices. If you do not want to, or can not reduce prices - just change the number on the site, and when communicating with the client on the phone try to explain to him that the price is slightly higher than indicated on the site. Many customers do not want to search the store again and agree to purchase. You can also use pre-sales (apels) for clients from such utilities.

News aggregators, although old as the world, but many webmasters still underestimate their significance. If you add your newsletter to a sufficient number of aggregators, then you can get the most traffic only from them. After all, people want to read news in one place, and not run around the Internet in search of a small note.

contextual advertising

In some commercial niches, there is almost no hope of getting into the top search engine, so contextual advertising becomes an uncompromising option. Setting the context is an art for those who do it. It is necessary to sort through the huge lists of keywords, filtering out the whitelist needed, and pick up negative keywords. Then you need to target the audience, pick up promotional materials, conduct tests and much more. In a word, it is better to delegate an advertising campaign to a knowledgeable person, or rather an advertising agency. After all, then you will have a constant connection with the performer and the confidence that tomorrow the traffic channel will not be covered, and you will continue to receive the necessary amounts of visitors to the site.

A similar system of work has also teaser advertising and targeting in social networks. If you want to receive customers or traffic is beneficial - be prepared to work on the parameters of the advertising campaign.

How to find the sources of competitor's traffic

The simplest to understand and popular is the service Similarweb.com

This service allows you to know the approximate amount of a monthly audience, the ownership of traffic by country and traffic sources, referral transitions and social involvement. "Симиларвеб" is useful for an approximate estimation of the competitor, but its figures, as a rule, are very inaccurate. You can check this by analyzing your website with it.

Sometimes on the site you can find a Live Internet statistics counter, not closed with a password. In this case, you will be able to view the statistics of such a resource without any problems. But such luck is very rare, because no one wants to shine key words and pages, which receives the maximum traffic.

The following services will also be able to help with the task of learning more about the sources of foreign traffic:

• Alexa.com;
• Compete.com;
• Semrush.com;
• Quantcast.com.

In addition to these standard services, there is a chance that the site you are interested in is now selling the exchange sites Telderi.ru. Then you can simply write to the seller and get all the necessary statistics without obligation to purchase.

How to analyze the received traffic

In order not to invent a bicycle, try the services of statistics "Yandex.Metrica", or you can use it as a service of analysis of traffic sources of Google Analytics. Both tools are powerful enough to track complex targets, set utm tags, and so on.

"Yandex.Metrika" has a more user-friendly interface, which allows the site owner to independently figure out the necessary statistics, make a slice of data, report on certain dates and indicators, etc. But the service from Google is more integrated with its contextual advertising Ad Words.

Target source of traffic

Service statistics "Google Analytics" provides the functionality of setting goals. The goal in this sense can be any action aimed at achieving a conversion. This may be the registration of an order, registration on the site, a made repost and so on. Correctly chosen goals allow in the future to adequately assess statistics and get a truly representative sample, without setting up a system of goals it is difficult to talk about a correct assessment of the effectiveness of the Internet business.

Targets are implemented at the presentation level and can be defined as screens or pages viewed by visitors, or a certain number of them. A goal can have a monetary equivalent. In this case, the conversion metric will be detailed by the value of each conversion, which will allow you to pay attention to really important types. This can be, for example, the maximum or minimum amount of the transaction on the site.

There are 5 types of goals, which we give below in the table.

How to set up goals in Google Analytics

To add a new goal to Google Analytics, you need to go to the admin panel, then the goal section - "Add target". Then follow the instructions:

1. Specify the name and type. The goal can be specified, for example, a page that opens in the browser after placing a purchase order, or subscriptions to an email newsletter.
2. You must enter the URL of the goal page. If necessary, you can assign a path to the target action and the value of this conversion.
3. Create a goal.

You can view the reports on the goals and the effectiveness of conversions in the "Conversions" section by selecting the "Goals" sub-item there. Here we will find information about the goals and the conversion rate, as well as information on the value of the goals in terms of money. Menu "Map of targets" provide you with the data in a graphical form.

The "Traffic Sources - Ad Words" section allows you to track the effectiveness of advertising for ad groups, campaigns, keywords, search queries.

Direct calls

The source of direct traffic causes a lot of questions from users of statistics from Google. The word direct in English means "direct", in the context of attendance, it is a visitor who has directly visited your site, that is, from bookmarks.

The indicator of direct visits can accurately reflect the quality of the resource's advertising offline, provided that you use it. If not - it's even better, then it's your honored regular readers.

Traffic source analysis

Analysis of the source of traffic implies a dense work with Google Analytics.

It will be a report, which is often used in analysis. Open it by selecting "Traffic sources" in the menu, and then select "All traffic". The first thing to notice is the graph of the total number of transitions, divided by day, as well as information about the sources.

For a detailed analysis, click on the source, selecting it from the general list. Now you can analyze in detail a separate source of traffic to learn things that are not visible on the general chart. We use the filter for an additional parameter.

Next, you can configure the parameters as convenient for you, check various statistical hypotheses, confirm and reject them.

Do not risk money

Statistics - an independent scientific discipline, which has many pitfalls, when intuitive things really should not be interpreted in the way we think. Therefore, the more money you spend on paid traffic channels, the more you risk misinterpreting data from the statistical sample. Therefore, it is better to outsource this activity to professionals.