How to use Google Analytics to analyze website traffic by customer acquisition channels

Author:

Analyzing website traffic by customer acquisition channels in Google Analytics helps you understand where your visitors are coming from and which channels are most effective in driving traffic to your site. Here’s a comprehensive guide on how to use Google Analytics to analyze website traffic by customer acquisition channels:

Setting Up Google Analytics

  1. Create a Google Analytics Account:
    • Sign in to Google Analytics with your Google account.
    • Follow the prompts to set up an account, property, and view.
  2. Install the Tracking Code:
    • Google Analytics provides a tracking code after setup.
    • Add this tracking code to every page of your website, typically in the <head> section of your HTML.

Key Acquisition Channels in Google Analytics

  1. Direct Traffic:
    • Visitors who arrive directly by typing your website URL into their browser.
  2. Organic Search:
    • Visitors who find your website through search engines like Google or Bing.
  3. Paid Search:
    • Visitors who arrive through paid search ads.
  4. Social:
    • Visitors from social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.
  5. Referral:
    • Visitors from other websites that link to your site.
  6. Email:
    • Visitors from email campaigns.
  7. Other:
    • Visitors from other sources that don’t fit into the above categories.

Accessing Acquisition Reports

  1. Overview Report:
    • Navigate to Acquisition > Overview to get a general sense of where your traffic is coming from.
    • This report provides a breakdown of sessions, new users, bounce rate, pages per session, and average session duration for each channel.
  2. All Traffic Report:
    • Go to Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels to see detailed metrics for each acquisition channel.
    • This report includes key metrics like users, sessions, bounce rate, pages per session, and conversion rates for each channel.
  3. Source/Medium Report:
    • Navigate to Acquisition > All Traffic > Source/Medium to see the performance of specific sources and mediums.
    • For example, you can see how traffic from google/organic compares to facebook/referral.
  4. Referrals Report:
    • Go to Acquisition > All Traffic > Referrals to see the websites referring traffic to your site.
    • This report includes metrics like sessions, new users, bounce rate, pages per session, and goal completions from each referring site.

Analyzing Customer Acquisition Channels

  1. Comparing Channels:
    • Use the Channels report to compare different acquisition channels.
    • Look at metrics like sessions, bounce rate, and conversion rates to identify which channels are performing well and which need improvement.
  2. Identifying Top Sources:
    • In the Source/Medium report, identify the top sources driving traffic to your site.
    • Analyze metrics like users, sessions, and goal completions to understand the quality of traffic from each source.
  3. Referral Traffic Analysis:
    • Use the Referrals report to identify the top websites referring traffic to your site.
    • Check metrics like bounce rate and average session duration to assess the quality of referral traffic.
  4. Campaign Performance:
    • For analyzing traffic from specific campaigns, navigate to Acquisition > Campaigns > All Campaigns.
    • Use UTM parameters to track specific campaigns and analyze their performance in this report.

Using Segments and Filters

  1. Creating Segments:
    • Create segments to isolate and analyze specific subsets of your traffic.
    • Click on + Add Segment in any report to create custom segments based on acquisition channels.
    • Examples: Segments for organic traffic, paid search traffic, or social media traffic.
  2. Applying Filters:
    • Use filters to narrow down your data in reports.
    • Apply filters to view data for specific acquisition channels, sources, or campaigns.

Advanced Analysis

  1. Custom Reports:
    • Go to Customization > Custom Reports to create reports tailored to your specific needs.
    • Select dimensions and metrics relevant to customer acquisition channels.
  2. Multi-Channel Funnels:
    • Navigate to Conversions > Multi-Channel Funnels > Overview to understand how different channels work together to drive conversions.
    • Use the Top Conversion Paths report to see the most common sequences of channel interactions that lead to conversions.
  3. Attribution Modeling:
    • Use Conversions > Attribution > Model Comparison Tool to compare different attribution models.
    • This helps you understand how assigning credit to different channels affects your understanding of channel performance.

Setting Up Goals

  1. Define Goals:
    • Navigate to Admin > View > Goals and click on + New Goal.
    • Choose a template or create a custom goal.
    • Define the goal type (e.g., destination, duration, pages/screens per session, or event).
  2. Set Up Goal Details:
    • For a destination goal (e.g., a thank-you page after a form submission), enter the URL of the destination page.
    • For event goals, specify the category, action, label, and value that you defined in your event tracking setup.
  3. Analyze Goal Conversions:
    • Navigate to Conversions > Goals > Overview to see how many users are completing your goals.
    • Use Goal Flow to visualize the path users take to complete your goals.

Conclusion

Using Google Analytics to analyze website traffic by customer acquisition channels provides deep insights into the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. By accessing and analyzing acquisition reports, creating custom segments and filters, and leveraging advanced analysis tools, you can gain a comprehensive understanding of how different channels contribute to your website’s performance. This data-driven approach allows you to optimize your marketing strategies, improve user engagement, and achieve your business objectives.

Categories: Digital Marketing