What You Need To Know About Website Traffic Sources and Web Design

There is a wide variety of ways to track traffic to your website. But what you need to know is that not all traffic sources are equal. By digging deeper into your website analytics, you can uncover your most successful traffic source not by the volume of visits but by conversion rates.

And with this conversion focus to looking at your traffic sources, you can make improvements to your web design that will deliver improved results for the various traffic sources your website experiences.

Setting Up UTMs for Google Analytics

To get a better look into your traffic sources and their conversion rates, you need to setup UTMs. UTM is short for Urchin Tracking Module. It provides more detail about your traffic sources.

For example, you can use a different UTM for each post on your social media. So while you might see that 100 visitors came to your website from Facebook, you might know that 3 out of the 4 conversions from those visitors came from one specific post thanks to UTM tracking code.

Without UTM, you’d have to try and connect the date of conversions to the dates of your posts and then with their traffic source. While the data is there within your Google Analytics account, it’s difficult to determine and time-consuming. UTMs put that information at your fingertips easily so you can get a better idea of the quality of traffic instead of just quantity.

In addition to conversion rates, you might look at the time on page. And this is where insights into your website design can come into play. You might find that different traffic sources convert at different total time on page.

For example, people who visit your website from a guest post might convert faster on your website than those who come from Google. That’s because the guest post has given them the information they need to make a decision, whereas those coming from Google need to learn more and explore.

Placing your calls to action in attractive, easy-to-find places for those coming from guest posts can help improve your already successful conversion rate for that audience.

Putting Advertising Money Where It’s Most Valuable

Now that you know the importance of following your website traffic sources and activity on the page, you’re ready to adjust your marketing activities accordingly.

One of the keys to this is in determining what traffic sources are delivering the best overall results. For example, social media platforms offer few insights into what happens to your potential customers after they reach your website. So while ads on these platforms might generate large click amounts, the traffic might be worthless when it comes to building your company.

Learn more about how much time this advertising traffic spends on your website, how many pages they view and on what page they convert. Pixels can provide some insight but website analytics will go deeper than what these pixels and on-platform analytics tell you.

The same is true for display ads that you run through programs outside of Google’s platforms. Google’s display ads incorporate well with Google Analytics, but you’ll need to put in more effort and add UTMs to display ads on other websites to learn their effectiveness for your website.

Web Design and SEO Impact on Website Analytics

As you dig deeper into your website analytics, you might learn it’s time for a new website design to aid in your website’s conversion rate. And, you might learn that you’re seeing minimal organic search traffic.

Whether you need web design services, SEO or both, New Light Digital is your partner in improving your online presence. Get a quote to learn more about our services and how we can help.