Web analytics is a complex business and depending on how you measure traffic, you can come up with some wildly differing results. Like any kind of statistics, the raw information that you are provided with is largely neutral, it’s what you extrapolate from the data that matters.
Forget About The Home Page
I’ve recently been analysing traffic to a web site that I have been asked to redesign. The client wants to attract new clients in particular areas of business. So I’ve been measuring the extent to which their content talks about those subjects and what percentage (if any) of the traffic that comes to their site via search engines is related to keywords in these areas of business.
One thing that struck me is that the current incarnation of their site works very differently to anything that I would have designed. 80% of the traffic to their current site is direct and direct to the home page. In other words, the majority of people visit the web site because they already know about the company. Building this kind of brand recognition can be a very expensive way to grow a company and find new business.
Promote Your Products And Services, Not Your Company
On sites that I design, usually it’s the other way around, 80% of the traffic will be from a search engine and will be to a page other that the home page. To my mind that’s an indication of a healthy web site that has the potential to grow. It indicates that people are looking for services and products, finding them and potentially discovering your company as a new source of the product as well.
Or Maybe Not…
Something I saw the other night though has made me question that slightly. Some organic traffic may in actual fact be direct traffic in disguise. To truly understand why people visit your web site you’ll have to understand what traffic really is organic and therefore has been worth your investment in creating good content for your web site.
How To Analyse Types of Web Traffic
When we use analytics packages to research how visitors find our web sites we generally break visits down into three categories:
- organic search
- referrals
- direct traffic
Organic search means that someone has typed a word or phrase into a search engine, you have appeared in the results and they have clicked through to your site.
A referral is when someone clicks on a link on a different web site or in an email to get to your web site.
Direct traffic is when someone types the address of a website into the address bar of the browser or clicks on the address in their favourites / bookmarks of their browser.
Direct traffic usually implies that the site is already known and therefore the site has a reasonable brand recognition. e.g. if you want to find Sony or BMW, you just type sony.com or bmw.com in to the address bar of your browser.
You do do that don’t you? That’s why companies put their domain names on posters and on adverts in magazines.
What Address Bar?
Well it would seem that not everyone does type the domain name into the address bar. In fact, I suspect most people don’t.
Now I’ve known and observed this for a long time, but always just discounted it as one of those “Why do people do that?” things (apparently they find it quicker). But the implications for web analytics has only just occurred on me.
I was watching someone book Eurostar tickets the other night. She knew that she wanted to book them via eurostar.com, she knows that eurostar.com exists, yet she opened up the browser and typed Eurostar into Google.
The first result was eurostar.com, she clicked through and proceeded to book the tickets as normal.
In analytics terms, that visit would have counted as an organic visit, but to my mind, it’s a direct visit. She knew the site she wanted to get to, she just happened to use a search engine to get there.
Discount Some Organic Traffic
So when you’re analysing your web stats look carefully at the organic traffic and perhaps think of some of the organic traffic as direct traffic. Organic traffic that could be classified as direct traffic includes things such as search engine traffic using keywords that are unique to your company e.g. your company name, a product or brand that only you provide, your domain name, the name of a member of staff.
It’s not that this isn’t good traffic to get, but if you’re serious about increasing business via your web site, you should take this kind of traffic as a given. Direct resources at the more challenging task of taking on your competitors for position in the search engines over more generic terms related to your products and services. This is where the real battle lies.
Finally, most people understand that they need to achieve better search engine results for their business to succeed, but like all things related to maintaining your web site, it’s an on going job. As your site improves in the rankings for specific terms, your competition will respond and you need to stay on top of creating fresh and relevant content.
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