Finding out where your website visitors are coming from is as foundational to the Internet as the link itself. But as marketers begin to invest more dollars into social media marketing and paid ads on various platforms, from Facebook to Twitter to StumbleUpon and more, the metrics to back up those investments become more powerful. Channel source tells marketers the volume of users coming from referrals, whether they're social, search or direct.
Let's look at the basics. Any analytics platform will include a section that tells you what channels, including social, search or other referrers, provided traffic to your website. There are two main takeaways: First, you may decide to optimize your presence on a social site if that channel already provides a healthy amount of traffic. Second, you may decide to put paid ads on a channel if the visitors from that channel are converting at a good rate.
See also: How to Lower Your Site's Bounce Rate
Hugo Smoter, director of marketing for Spreadshirt, an ecommerce platform, says channel source is a metric his team watches on a regular basis — and they drill down a bit further by measuring the ratio of visits to purchases for each channel.
"[Channel source visits per orders is] a broad KPI that shows the channel acquisition paths of any particular business," says Smoter. "Depending on composition, marketers can allocate resources to specific channels."
Your marketing efforts will determine which channels to pit against each other, but you'll probably look at many of the following categories: direct traffic, organic search, social, email, referral, paid search, display ads or other advertising.
"If a particular social channel or website is referring users to your site more than others, it’s an extremely helpful tool for brands to consider," says Jason Squardo, executive vice president of optimization at ZOG Digital.
As the number of social channels grow, it becomes more difficult for your team to track the niche communities on every social channel. But, when you see a surge of traffic coming from a specific site, it can indicate something you are doing is resonating there. You can optimize content for the social sites that are already supplying visitors.
"For example, it’s also important if Facebook is referring the majority of your site traffic," Squardo says. "It’s critical to consider what it is about Facebook users that might appeal to your content, products or services." Then, do more to reach them and people like them.
The lesson of social goes much further than traffic and conversions. Social sites often are an indicator of how users percieve your brand, even if these users are not in the market for your product or services. If a relationship exists now, it is important to understand and invest in that relationship to get long-term results.
"The more we can understand, with a great level of detail, what impact social media has relative to our other sources, the better we understand the dynamics of the relationship our fans or followers have with us, and the more we can determine how to do it better," says Jon Gibs, VP of Analytics at Huge.
"Organic search is still king," says Dan Scalco, founder of Digitalux. "SEO still drives the majority of my most successful traffic."
You may have heard that search is no longer as important as social, but Scalco's experience shows that isn't the case. Search engines are always changing their algorithms to improve the experience for the user, which periodically changes the best practices for winning at SEO — but that doesn't mean it should be ignored.
It doesn't matter if your site gets more traffic from social overall — if search is providing traffic that converts through the funnel, or to purchases, SEO is where to invest your marketing budget.
"In many cases, navigation search (i.e. Searching for "Amazon" rather than typing "Amazon.com" into a browser bar) is the source that drives the most traffic," says Gibs. "A marketing channel report would tell the analyst that this was the most important area, and therefore they should reallocate resources to navigational or branded search terms."
Paid search is also applicable here, Gibs says. A premium display unit tends to almost never get clicked, but an attribution model could reveal that the people who convert are more likely to have seen a premium unit — it doesn't show up as a channel source, but is an indirect driver of traffic.
Advertising isn't just one channel — it can include paid search, display ads and ads on social sites.
It's possible that organic search traffic — or referrals from Facebook — could lead you to invest paid ads into Google and Facebook, respectively. Measuring the efficiency will come down to bringing a few related metrics together. You'll want to look at the conversions per user of each channel, and compare that to the investment into that channel.
"In an ideal scenario, an analyst looks at the traffic source and compares the amount of money they are spending to drive traffic from that channel, and lines that up to the finical outcome of that visit and the profile of that visitor over time," says Gibs.
With all the marketing options today, from classic display ads to not-yet-proven native options, there's even more reason to drill down into the outcome of each. A marketing budget with room for experimentation will be able to help you determine what pays off. Measuring user actions by channel source provides documentation and concrete evidence for where you should apply your marketing power.
"Looking at the drivers of conversation, sharing, engagement and traffic is really important to us," says Rob Longert, VP at M Booth. "We take a test and learn approach when it comes to brand storytelling and understanding the drivers of action helps us determine what levers to pull in the future."
What levers have you pulled to up performance for a certain channel? Tell us in the comments.
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