Summary:

Learning to visualize all of your traffic sources will help communicate and identify overall digital performance for your website. I have found that through visualizing traffic source data you can create the foundation for understanding seasonality within your business. Visualizing your traffic sources will also help identify opportunity areas you may otherwise not have notices.

The step by step process to visualizing your data by traffic source

The first step is to go to your website's analytics dashboard. If you have not set up an analytics platform yet, I would recommend to use Google Analytics.

Once you are in the Google Analytics dashboard, navigate to the "acquisitions" tab. Then select "All Traffic" and "Channels".

Once you have landed on this screen, add to view the data by using secondary dimensions and setting to view the data by the week of the year.

Now that the data is displayed how we want it. Navigate the the upper right navigation and select "export".

Exporting the data into an excel file will then allow you to visualize this data graphically. For the sake focusing on the key take away here I will save the excel tutorial for my next post.

The goal is to turn our data into a visual that we can both analyze and present week over week by channel (traffic source).

As you can see above our session data is broken out by traffic source. There are a few really beneficial take aways for looking at this data week over week.

Benefits:

1. We will be able to contextualize the optimizations we are making each week and see the overall increase/decrease in sessions.
2. If we are aware of seasonality within the business, we can most likely identify which weeks are being impacted the most.
3. When it comes to  story telling with the data, this is a great visual to kick off the conversation. Whether that conversation is internally with your team or presenting to a client.

Google Analytics is just part of the equation in understanding you investments in driving traffic to your website. Learn more about Google Ads to better invest in PPC and display ads when your customer looks for your services on Google.

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