Where Web Site Visitors Come From: A True Story of How I Learned to Increase My Company’s Web Traffic

It is Sunday afternoon and it is freezing outside. I can’t go out to play so I am catching up with work while co-mingling my attention and efforts with home projects. One of the items on my to-do list was to check out our website traffic statistics, and so off I went to the admin panel to begin digging into our reports. In order for these reports to be relevant, I also pulled up my history files for recent activities such as blog posts on our site, LinkedIn updates, Tweets on Twitter, article submissions to ezinearticles.com as well as comments posted on other blogs, and now, embarrassed as I am to admit it, Facebook entries. Yes, I was a late adopter to Facebook and I will address that in a future blog. 

Why pull up this information? It should all be relevant to the traffic spikes on our site. I look at the posts, updates and entries to learn what was interesting, and well, what was boring. Allow me to share some breadcrumb facts. 

Breadcrumbs? Yes, hopefully you read my entry on getting a life online. What all this activity is meant to do is to leave a breadcrumb trail back to you. Your activity on the Internet leaves breadcrumbs for the search engines to follow you home and leaves breadcrumbs for people interested in you and what you do. 

Some things I found interesting on our most recent report (your results may vary): 

• LinkedIn drives more traffic to our site than any of the other social sites, with Twitter coming in second. 

• Length of stay and pages viewed is higher from Twitter followers than from LinkedIn. 

• The third site driving in traffic with meaningful visit time and pages viewed is ezinearticles.com, where I post some of our blog articles. 

• The highest traffic is direct traffic and with the percentage of new visitors being higher than returning, I can assume that our drip marketing and networking efforts are having an impact. I can also assume that there is little reason for our clients to return to our site – something we need to work on. 

Breadcrumb results were interesting as I am now able to tell what posts drive the most interest and my communication efforts can now be refined and targeted toward those topics and keywords. 

We have great organic volume as well, however not as impressive for length of stay and pages viewed so we need to take a look at what general searchers are not getting from us when they search. In all fairness to us, many of the searches that take away from having impressive statistics is the number of searches for bumblebees and hives rather than web design and marketing. 

Maximizing the advantage we have from designing and maintaining so many websites is that our name appears – a tiny link at the bottom of those pages – and this drives more traffic to our site than any other medium. It is safe to assume that if someone visits a website that they like and are in the market for a new site, they would explore the company that designed and developed the site that they are on. Yes, this is an unfair advantage but not necessarily one that you can’t explore. Look toward your vendors, clients and partners for linking options. 

Hopefully this offers some insight as to why we have been preaching to get out there and get going with activities on the Internet. Social networking should be a key component to your marketing efforts. The goal is to build a network, make new connections, sources and nurture prospects. The exposure for your firm comes along for the ride and therefore you are brand building in the process. Now it is not ‘miracle grow’ but it is Miracle Marketing. 

There is valuable feedback to be gained from these endeavors. If you haven’t already signed up for Google Analytics and aren’t checking it regularly – start. Understand that these activities are geared toward prospecting and brand building, and not for selling. Warning: you will not experience instant gratification or instant success, but you just might deliver on the promise for a bright future. 

Don’t forget to follow me on Twitter: Twitter.com/MardySitzer