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In part 1 - Conversion Rate Optimisation - How to Increase Sales we looked at what you need to measure to be able to improve your conversion rate - to get more of the visitors to your website to become paying customers.

In this post, I promised to talk about the three sources of traffic to your website, and how to measure them properly.

So what are these three sources of prospective customers?

1) Search Traffic: - People who are looking for you

These are people who found your website via a search engine such as Google, Youtube, Yahoo or Bing. They used keywords to search for something, they asked a question using words, and the search engine gave them back a page of links, usually with a short description of the webpage, or text from the webpage relevant to their search (this is a Search Engine Results Page or SERP). The searcher decides which of these links is most relevant, and clicks through to your webpage, or to one of the competing pages. Note that the search engines supply individual web pages, not websites, in the results. So some, many, or most visitors will not enter your website by the front door.

Anatomy of a Google Search Engine Results Page

As you can see from the image above, the search engine results page has three results sections - section (2) is the "sponsored listings" Adwords adverts. These are adverts that are relevant to the keywords used in the search (1).

Sections (3) and (4) are the unpaid search results - the "Places" free ads, and the "organic" search results.

By setting up a goal in your Google Analytics account, you will be able to find out which keywords people used to find your pages, and which pages they found.

If you are using Google Adwords to buy a sponsored listing, your Adwords account campaign statistics will show you which keywords were used, how many people saw your advert, how many of them clicked on it, the position of your ad, and how much you paid for each click. You will need to have configured your Google Analytics with a goal, and have linked your Adwords and analytics accounts to be able to measure the conversion rate of the ads. This information will not be available immediately - you need to wait about 24 hours before your Analytics account is updated.

This means that you cannot really analyse the effectiveness of your advertising campaigns while they are running. You may get a good quality score from Google Adwords for your ad, which means that it is getting a good click through rate, and the people who click on it are not just bouncing back to Google to look at a different result. A better quality score means a lower cost per click, and a higher listing - you ad will appear higher up the page, and will be more likely to be clicked on. But if these visitors do not buy anything from you, then even though they are happy, and Google is happy, you are just wasting your money.

2) Referral Traffic - People who were told about you

These are people who have found your website because they clicked on a link on another website. Maybe you added your business to a local business directory website, and local people who were looking for your product or service use that because they know and trust it. Maybe you have an ad in the Golden pages (or Yellow Pages if you are not in Ireland) and people who searched the online Golden Pages found a link to your website there. Maybe you have a Facebook Business Page, or a LinkedIn profile for your business. Maybe you wrote some articles and submitted them to an article sharing website like Ezinarticles or ArticlesBase. Maybe you left a comment on somebody's blog, or in an online forum, and a link to your website.

As with the search traffic, if you have Google Analytics set up with a goal for your customer conversion (to a sale - remember) you will be able to find out where that customer came from - which website had the link they clicked on. There won't be any keywords though, because that information (if they did a search, found the other website first, and then the link to your website) is not shared by the search engines. Google knows, but you don't.

3) Direct Traffic - People who already know who you are

These are people who went directly to your website, either by typing in the url or via their bookmarks. This is often the largest source of visitors, and very few businesses know how to find out where they came from. Was it that advert in the local newspaper? The radio interview? One of the trade shows you exhibited at? Maybe it was off your business card, or one of your colleagues or employees?

If you don't know how they found you, you won't be able to calculate the return on investment from all of these offline marketing activities. You could ask, of course, and you should, but this type of information gathering is not very accurate. There are much more reliable ways of tracing the source of these customers.

One way of tracking direct visitors is to set up a unique domain name per offline campaign - so for example if your website is mybiz.ie, you could set a domain name called mybizdeal.ie for you newspaper ads, mybizoffer.ie for your radio ads, mybiz-RDS.ie for the trade show in the RDS, and so on. This could be set up as a mini website, which continues the process your advert or trade show material started. Or you could just redirect all the visitors to those urls to your home page, or preferably to a specially designed landing page (a landing page is a web page designed specifically for the people that you wanted to attract with adverts in that medium, that is congruent with the message in the advert).  Google Analytics will then show those visitors as referral traffic, with the url of your specially set up domain name as the referrer.

Now you know where your visitors came from, and the relative conversion rates of each source of customers, how will you use this information? Let's talk about that soon - we'll have a look at Google Analytics, segmenting your traffic, setting up your conversion goal(s), measuring conversion rates of each traffic source, the landing pages, and understanding your sales funnel. Let's find out where your website is bleeding visitors before they get a chance to find out how excellent your products and services are - and how to go about plugging those holes.

If you have any questions or comments, please share them below. The best comment (judged by me) will win a half hour website analysis consultation, so don't hold back.

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