Google Analytics is a web analytics software that lets you track website traffic and analyse user behaviour on your website. For the uninitiated, installing and tracking your website’s performance with Google Analytics may be an intimidating task, but in reality there’s no reason why it should be.

What you can track in Google Analytics

Google Analytics allows you to:

1. Know your visitors

Tracking traffic sources may help you figure out where your visitors are from and which channels they use, so you can learn more about them and provide them more tailored messages.

 

2. Monitor your campaign performance

If the goal of a campaign is to generate traffic, you may track different traffic sources to see how effective it is.

 

3. Discover your best and worst channels

By determining which channel brought the most visits to your site, you can concentrate your efforts there to get even greater results. You can figure out which channels aren’t doing a good job of attracting and converting visitors and improve them.

 

4. Research new content ideas

People from various channels may be interested in distinct topics, so examining your traffic sources for each page will help you come up with fresh content ideas.

 

How to track website traffic by channel in Google Analytics

Step 1: Click Acquisition.

Step 2: Click All Traffic.

Step 3: Click Channels.

Now you can see a breakdown of the different traffic channels that Google Analytics has recorded your users coming from:

Direct : The user has entered your website by typing in the URL or using a bookmark.

Organic Search : The user has found your website on a search engine.

Social : The user has found your website on social media.

Email : The user has clicked on a link in an email.

Referral : The user has come from another website.

Paid Search : The user has clicked on an ad in a search engine.

Now we’ve seen an overview of what channels users are coming from when they enter the website, but what about for specific pages?

How to track website traffic for specific pages by channel in Google Analytics

Step 1: Click Behavior.

Step 2: Click Site Content.

Step 3: Click Landing Pages.

You can now view a report similar to the previous one but broken down by each landing page on your site. This is particularly useful if some pages are heavily biased towards getting traffic from one channel over others as you may not notice this is happening if you’re only viewing the more holistic previous report.

To dig deeper and get an even more detailed breakdown of user acquisition channels for each specific page, click Secondary dimension and search for and select source/medium.

Source / medium presents a more detailed breakdown of where users are coming from than channel does; channel only gives the most general information like ‘paid’, ‘direct’, ‘organic’ or ‘social’. Rather than, for example, just ‘organic’, the source will display Google and the medium will display organic if they found your site in Google’s organic search results. This is particularly useful for high traffic sites with users being brought in via multiple campaigns.

A simpler explanation for source and medium is where the user was before arriving on your website, and how they got there.