Understanding Google Analytics Traffic Sources

If you’ve ever logged into your Google Analytics account, you may have looked at the different traffic sources and wondered what they mean. If you’re unfamiliar with terms like direct, organic, or referral, it may be hard to know where your traffic comes from. You’re probably more familiar with email and social as they’re pretty self-explanatory. Let's look at the different Google Analytics traffic sources that matter to your business. 

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What is direct traffic in Google Analytics?

Direct traffic represents the number of people who come directly to your website. They already knew your URL and typed it in without going through a search engine. When you have a new business, you likely won’t have a lot of direct traffic because people don’t know you yet. As you become a more established business and build a brand, you will likely see your direct traffic increase.

What can help your direct traffic increase?

Over time, your website’s direct traffic will likely increase as more people get to know your brand and website. Some advertising you do will also increase your direct traffic, especially if you’re including your URL in the ads. For example, I have a long-term client who does billboards a couple of times a year, and we always see an increase in direct traffic when the billboards are in the community. You will likely see increased direct traffic as you build your brand awareness. It’s a good indication of how familiar people are with your brand or business name. 

What is referral traffic in Google Analytics?

Referral traffic is traffic that finds a link on another website, clicks it, and visits your website. Referral traffic can come from being quoted in media pieces, guesting on podcasts, being featured in someone else’s newsletter, having a link to your site on another one, etc. If you are running an ad or sponsoring something and they’ve linked to your website, looking at your referring traffic (and then going into the report to see the actual websites that are referring traffic to you) can help you see if you’re getting a return on your ad spend or sponsorship. You can also see if your podcast interviews, media mentions, or guest blog posts are helping to drive traffic to your website.

How do you increase your referral traffic?

It’s simple and hard at the same time. To get more referral traffic, you need more websites to link to yours. You will probably start out with no referral traffic and build it over time, but it will not likely be your main traffic source. Your referral traffic will likely remain in positions 4 or 5 for traffic sources most months unless you have a big ad promotion or a super successful media mention. Usually, referral traffic is lower than direct, organic (if you’re doing SEO), social, or email traffic.

What is organic traffic in Google Analytics?

Organic traffic is my favorite. It’s the traffic you get from Google and other search engines. When someone goes to a search engine and searches keywords or even your business name, clicks your listing in the results, and visits your website, it’s marked as an organic visit. When you’re first starting out, you likely won’t have much, if any, organic traffic. It takes time to optimize your website or blog and then let Google begin to find your content and index and rank it. It’s not an immediate process.

How do you increase your organic traffic?

You can increase your organic traffic by doing SEO (search engine optimization) on your website or blog. When you optimize the content you’re creating, you help get more organic traffic to it. SEO is the way to connect your audience to the content you’re creating. Each new post or website page you create that’s properly optimized is another chance to increase your organic website or blog traffic. Your organic traffic should increase as you build up your content and optimize it for the search engines. The great thing about organic traffic is that it doesn’t go away quickly like paid traffic. It takes a bit longer to start growing, but it lasts much longer (years in many cases). 

What is paid traffic in Google Analytics? 

In your Google Analytics report, paid traffic is your Google paid traffic. If you’re running Google ads, their traffic will show up under paid traffic. If you’re running social media ads, that traffic will be under your social media – paid traffic label. 

How do you increase your paid traffic?

It’s simple: if you want more paid traffic, you need to increase your ad budget. The more you spend on ads, the more paid traffic you’ll receive. You want to watch for performance and determine if you’re getting a positive return on your investment when doing paid ads. I haven’t actively managed paid ads in more than 10 years, so I don’t teach them, but there are great resources out there if you want to learn more about using Google Ads. 

What is email traffic in Google Analytics?

Email traffic represents the number of people who visited your website from one of your emails. When you add links to your website or blog post to your emails, and people click on them, they’ll be reported in the email section.

How do you increase your email traffic?

This one is simple and in your control – if you don’t have email traffic yet or you’re not getting much, be sure you’re including links to your website or blog post in your weekly emails. If you’re not yet sending weekly emails to your audience, that’s your first step. Creating weekly emails and sharing your content will be important to help nurture your audience if you want them to convert and become customers.

What is social media traffic in Google Analytics?

If you’re running ads, you’ll see two types of social media traffic – organic and paid. Organic social media traffic should be the people who visit your website from your social media accounts (Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, TikTok, YouTube, etc.). Paid social media will be the visits you’re getting from social media ads. You want to look for both if you’re running ads.

Social media traffic information, especially organic, can help determine if your social media efforts are paying off. You likely aren’t getting a lot of organic social media traffic because the social media apps are designed to keep people on their apps, not send them to your website. The exception is Pinterest, which will be reported in this section. However, Pinterest is more of a visual search engine than a social media channel, so it sends more traffic to websites.

How do you increase your social media traffic?

To increase your paid social media traffic, you need to run ads or increase the budget on the ones you’re currently running. If you want to increase your organic social media traffic, except on Pinterest, it will be very difficult because of how the apps work. Social media apps aren’t designed to drive visitors from the app to your website. I would not recommend setting this as a goal. If you want to grow your email list via social media, I recommend using a tool such as Many Chat to automate DMs and send people the link to your opt-ins if they request them. You can increase your traffic from Pinterest by being more active, pinning regularly, and adding optimized content.

The best way I’ve found to increase my website traffic is through a mix of direct, email, referral, and organic traffic. I create great content and optimize it for Google and that helps drive organic traffic. My podcast helps drive direct traffic because people search for the website and freebies I mention in the episodes. I grow my referral traffic by doing digital PR and guesting on other podcasts, and my email traffic grows as my email list grows. I don’t worry about social media traffic, at least organic, because it’s not designed to send traffic to websites anyway, so I look at whatever I get from social media as a bonus. I do run ads sometimes to help expand my reach a bit further. 

If you’re ready to increase your organic traffic, request a copy of my free Beginner’s Guide to SEO or take SEO 101 (or both!) and learn how search engine optimization works and how your blog can help grow your website traffic better than just about any other option out there.