We all want to know how people find our website, and Google Analytics can tell us this information. (read full post -goo.gl/X4h9Pp) Sign up for our Free Google Analytics Mini-Course - goo.gl/Stoa2p In fact, if you look in your Google Analytics account right now, you can see how your visitors navigate to your website. Google has neatly organized your web traffic using something called channel grouping. Channels represent the paths visitors take to arrive on your website. Some visitors type in your URL, some search your brand name, others search by topic and find your content. But there are some problems with the default channel grouping in Google Analytics. The default channels are extremely broad. They lump most of your web traffic into one category. These broad categories don't allow you to learn much about your website traffic. But don't worry. We are going to fix this problem.... by creating custom channel grouping in Google Analytics!! That's right. Today we are going to learn one of the most effective techniques for analyzing your website traffic! In this post and video, we'll look at what channel groupings are. We'll learn how we can create custom channels to improve our web analytics. We'll talk about the best strategies for building custom channel grouping. I'll also show you exactly how I set up my channel grouping, and how I can improve my them. Channel grouping in Google Analytics Before we get into creating some kick-ass custom channel groupings... Let's talk about the default channels. We need to know what the default channels are, and how these channels organize our web traffic. Once we know how our default channels work, we can start making some simple, but awesome, custom channels! Default channel grouping in Google Analytics The default channels in Google Analytics include: organic search, direct, social, email, referral Organic Search Organic search is traffic that found your website using a search engine. This group includes every search that was used to find your website. These searches could be related to your brand, your content, or your products. For many websites, organic search dominates their traffic numbers. You can see from my example below, that organic search accounts for over 70% of the traffic going to Jeffalytics. This very broad category tends to limit our ability to learn more about our search traffic. We'll look at how to fix this problem later in this post. Direct Direct traffic accounts for site visitors that came directly to your URL. These people typed your URL into their browser and went right to your site. I often refer to this channel as "The Darkness." It's hard to learn anything about where these visitors came from our why they used our URL. Since I can't learn anything from this channel, it's like the black hole of my channel grouping. Social The social channel is any traffic that came to your website from a social media source. Email This channel is set up to account for the traffic that clicks through to your site from links in your email. Keep in mind that you have to use UTM parameters in your email links for Google to track this traffic. If you're not using UTM parameters, Google won't be able to sort you email traffic into this channel. Referral Referral traffic is traffic that was sent to your site from a link on another site. Clicking on your referral channel in your analytics account will allow you to see the referrals that are sending you traffic. Below is an example of where my referral traffic is coming from. What's wrong with the default channel grouping in Google Analytics? Fair warning, I am about to go on a bit of rant here. [If you want to hear my full rant, watch the video above]. The default channel grouping in Google Analytics is very well thought out. The channels account for just about every traffic source on the web. But, not all websites are the same. The defaults are one size fits all tool. The default settings don't take into account the way you use your website. The default channels are broad and generic. The generic categories limit what we can learn about our website visitors. They also don't allow us to see how our marketing efforts are really working! Let's look at this problem as it relates to the organic search channel. Organic search channel problems We'll use my data as the example again. As you can see, I can't infer much from my channel report. 70% of my traffic is categorized as organic search. Organic search is such a big category that I can't do any meaningful analysis of my traffic. The visitors in this category could have searched my name. Or they could have searched for content about Google Analytics and found my site. Or maybe they searched a PPC topic and landed on one of my blog posts. (read full post -goo.gl/X4h9Pp)

Be the first to comment