How do I find out the source of traffic?

Internet traffic is nothing more than the sum of allweb resource visitors. 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 thing is constant: it always needs more than it is at the moment. We will try to highlight the topic of attendance in as much detail as possible by answering all the basic questions that traffic has about beginning webmasters.

Traffic sources

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

• search engines;
• social networks;
• mobile instant messengers;
• bookmarks in the browser;
• portals and forums;
• offline advertising;
• online advertising;
• other sources.

It is noteworthy that you need to decide howfurther monetization of your project on the Internet to find the necessary growth strategy for attendance. If you plan to make money on sales, then any source of traffic, including advertising, will suit you. But for content sites, this is not profitable, because their business model involves making money on selling advertising, and the more expensive the resale of traffic is another story. Therefore, we first consider the free traffic sources.

How to get visitors for free

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

1. Search engines To get to the top search results, the easiest way is to select a special semantic core of search queries. Under these requests, you will need to write articles that will be targeted to a specific keyword.
2. Social like "Vkontakte" and "Facebook"allow you to create public interest groups. Filling these groups with interesting content and leaving a link to it in other public pages, you can gain subscribers, which can then be turned into an audience of your portal.
3. Mobile instant messengers supportchat bots function. You can create any bot with unusual answers, and people will throw off each other links to it. So you get an audience, which can then be converted into traffic to your resource.
4. If you already have high attendance values ​​from various sources, work hard to make people bookmark your site and visit it regularly.
5. Portals of interest, like "Peekaboo" or "Habrahabr", have a sufficiently solvent audience. If you prove yourself there, you can silently advertise your website or product.
6. People still go out and look at the billboards. This method of advertising works well on a large scale advertising budget.
7. Online advertising has many varieties, and it is better to entrust a professional, explaining in detail their goals and objectives.

New traffic sources

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

Visitors for the online store can attractwith the help of utilities like Yandex.Market, which show the user the stores with the lowest prices. If you do not want, 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 (apsles) for customers from such utilities.

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

contextual advertising

In some commercial niches to get into the topThere is almost no hope of search results, so contextual advertising becomes an uncompromising option. Setting the context is an art for those involved. It is necessary to sort through huge lists of keywords, filtering the ones you need into the white list, 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, and better to an advertising agency. After all, then you will have a permanent connection with the performer and confidence that the traffic channel will not be closed tomorrow, and you will continue to receive the necessary volumes of visitors to the site.

Teaser advertising and social media targeting also have a similar system of work. If you want to get customers or traffic is profitable - be prepared to work on the parameters of the advertising campaign.

How to find out the sources of competitor traffic

The easiest to understand and popular service is Similarweb.com

This service allows you to find out the approximate amountmonthly audience, affiliation of traffic by countries and sources of traffic, referral transitions and social involvement. Similarweb is useful for a rough assessment of a competitor, but its numbers are usually very inaccurate. You can check this out by analyzing your website with it.

Sometimes on the site you can find a counterLive Internet statistics not password protected. In this case, you can view the statistics of such a resource without any problems. But such luck comes very rarely, because no one wants to shine keywords and pages that receive 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 thatThe site you are interested in is now being sold by the Telderi.ru website exchange. Then you can simply write to the seller and get all the necessary statistics without the obligation to purchase.

How to analyze the received traffic

In order not to invent a bicycle, tryYandex.Metrika statistics services, or you can use Google Analytics as a traffic analysis service. Both tools are powerful enough to track complex targets, set utm-tags, and more.

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

Target traffic source

The Google Analytics statistics service providesgoal setting functionality. The goal in this understanding can be any action aimed at achieving conversion. This may be the ordering, registration on the site, made repost and so on. Properly chosen goals make it possible in the future to adequately evaluate the statistics and to obtain a truly representative sample; without setting up a system of goals, it is difficult to speak of a correct assessment of the effectiveness of Internet business.

Goals are realized at the presentation level andcan be defined as screens or pages viewed by visitors, or a certain number of them. The goal may have a cash equivalent. In this case, the conversion rate will be detailed by the value of each conversion, which will allow you to pay attention to the really important types. This may be, for example, the maximum or minimum amount of a transaction on the site.

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

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 a goal”. Then follow the instructions:

1. Specify the name and type. The goal can be, for example, a page that opens in the browser after placing an order for a purchase, or a subscription to an email newsletter.
2. You must specify 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.

View progress reports andconversion efficiency, you can in the section "Conversions" by selecting the sub-item "Goals". Here we will find information about the goals achieved and the conversion rate, information about the value of goals in monetary terms will also be available. The "Target Map" menu provides you with graphical data.

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

Direct calls

The source of direct traffic causes a lotquestions from users of statistics from Google. The word direct translated from English means "direct", in the context of attendance it is a visitor who went directly to your site, that is, from bookmarks.

The rate of direct visits can quite accuratelydisplay the quality of advertising resource offline, provided that you use it. If not, then even better, then this is your deserved regular readers.

Traffic sources analysis

The analysis of the traffic source implies a tight work with Google Analytics.

It's about the report, which oftenused in the analysis. Open it by selecting "Traffic Sources" in the menu, then select "All traffic". First of all, the graph of the total number of transitions, distributed by day, as well as information about the sources, is striking.

For a detailed analysis click on the sourceselecting it from the general list. Now you can analyze in detail a separate source of traffic in order to study things that are not noticeable on the general graph. Use the filter for an additional parameter.

Then you can configure the parameters as you like, test various statistical hypotheses, confirm and reject them.

Do not risk money

Statistics is an independent scientific discipline,which has many pitfalls, when intuitive things really need to be interpreted differently than we think. Therefore, the more money you spend on paid traffic channels, the more you risk misinterpreting statistical sampling data. Therefore, it is better to outsource such activities to professionals.