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Google Analytics Traffic Sources

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Google Analytics Traffic Sources: That’s what they say!

Google Analytics is one of the leading web analysis programs for data-driven online marketing. Marketers receive the necessary data via Google Analytics in order to be able to make targeted decisions in the field of online marketing. In this blog post, we would like to deal with the various online marketing channels and measurability in Google Analytics. In the standard settings, you will find an overview of channels under acquisition.

Divided into Paid Search, Referral, Organic Search, Direct, Display, Social, and Other, this division gives an insight into the channel’s performance and thus the possibility to make decisions with supported data.

Channel Organic Search

The organic search channel includes all page accesses that took place via a standard search engine. You can use this channel to draw conclusions about search engine performance. It is important to note that not all search engines fall into this category by default. Search engines such as t-online.de, web.de, or gmx.net must also be defined in the administration.

channel referral

In the classic sense, referral traffic is the traffic that comes to your website via referral pages. Internally, we always refer to it as a recommendation. Another website expresses its recommendation in the form of a link, which thus not only ensures relevance in the search engines ( link building ), but also contributes to direct traffic. This traffic is measured in the referral area. A problem that arises in particular with online shops is the assignment of payment services such as PayPal; here, the traffic that pays with PayPal is often assigned to the referral, although the customers have become aware of the online shop via another channel. This is also a setting that has to be made in the analytics administration.

Channel Direct

Direct traffic is defined as users who enter the domain directly into the command line of the browser used and search for a way to the target page without a previous touch point. In addition to direct access, the following user activities can also lead to an assignment to the direct channel. Such as:

– Dark social traffic (non-measurable sources → WhatsApp)
– Links from documents (Word documents, PDFs, Excel tables, etc.)
– 302 – Redirects
– Bot and Spider Traffic
– Visitors from print and TV media
– Incomplete tagging
– Bookmarks
– Links from emails (unless tagged)

In order to obtain more quality data at this point, as many sources of traffic as possible should also be tagged so that more performance can be attributed to the individual advertising campaigns.

Channel Paid Search

The paid search channel includes the traffic that comes to the site via paid search engine ads (Bing Ads or Google AdWords). Linking Google AdWords and Google Analytics provides additional cost information in the Google Analytics account . Bing Ads data can be mapped manually in Google Analytics via a data import.

Conclusion: Google Analytics channels

A clean tag brings transparency. You quickly recognize dependencies on certain channels and can thus spread the budget better, diversify the resulting risk, and better assess the behavior of the various visitors. Data quality is also crucial at this point in order to be able to make well-founded decisions. As a Google Analytics agency, we would be happy to support you in setting up your Google Analytics account and the Google Analytics channels.

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