Google Analytics Traffic Sources. Your traffic sources overview is one of the most important parts of your Analytics account. Where your traffic is coming from tells you a lot about the strength of your SEO, your incoming links, and your AdWords and other advertising campaigns. It also shows you where your weaknesses are. Ideally, you want traffic coming from a variety of sources, so that your traffic isn’t tied to closely to a single source that’s beyond your control. For example, if 80% of your traffic comes from organic Google results, and suddenly Google changes their algorithm and your site ends up on page 10 instead of the top of page 1, you’ll see a huge drop in traffic. But if only 40% of your traffic is coming from the same source, it’s easier to compensate (in this case you might increase your AdWords spending to compensate for a lack of presence in organic results).
One of the most important reports in your traffic sources is the keyword reports. These are vital to figuring out how your search traffic is finding your site. Because Analytics tracks not only the top keywords driving traffic to your site, but every keyword used, you can see all the long-tail search results driving traffic to your site. There’s a brief keyword report on your overview page, but more detailed reports can be found under the “Search” sub-report.
The search sub-report also tells you which page visitors are landing on most often, and which search engine they’re coming from. You can view your paid (AdWords) traffic and organic traffic, or a mix of the two. You can also view traffic in terms of campaigns, including traffic from RSS feeds.
If you use AdWords, you can view detailed reports for traffic driven by your ads, including campaigns, keywords, day parts, destination URLs, placements, keyword positions, and TV ads. These reports show you the number of visits generated, how many pages/visit, the average time spent on the site, the percentage of new visits, the bounce rate, your total goal completions, and the revenue generated from each. The last two are the most important metrics to watch, as you want to make sure that the ads are generating enough revenue or conversions to make them worthwhile. You may have some ads that only drive a small percentage of traffic, but a large number of those visitors convert (or vice versa). Without knowing the goal completions or revenue, you might disregard those ads and throw away important revenue sources.