Website Traffic Sources: Find the Visits That Bring Customers

Two campaigns can each send 500 visitors and produce very different results. Ten qualified consultations are more useful to a booked-by-appointment business than a thousand visits from outside its service area. Start a traffic report with the destination, audience, and outcome.

Read source and destination together

Separate organic search, paid search, paid social, referral, email, and direct traffic where the data allows. Direct is not a precise count of people typing your URL: a missing referrer or campaign tag can also leave a visit without a known source. Compare blog readership with other content marketing rather than expecting the homepage to explain every visit.

Find where a change started

When visits fall, break the change down by date, source, device, and landing page. Check for a tracking change, a broken address, or a campaign that stopped spending. After a switch from an AMP site, compare equivalent URLs. Review web analytics and web performance before attributing a decline to demand.

Buy traffic with an explicit hypothesis

Use paid search to test demand expressed in a query and social media to demonstrate an offer. Give each a relevant landing page. If you spend $300 and earn six qualified inquiries, your cost per qualified inquiry is $50. Compare that with close rate and contribution per sale.

Invest in the pages that help customers decide

If a detailed comparison attracts qualified traffic, strengthen the next step instead of chasing more impressions. When you create a site, plan web design around those decisions. Evaluate SEO packages and your wider marketing strategy by what they improve on the site and for its visitors.