Your site should have traffic from a variety of sources. This is important to know especially if you have paid campaigns. There are three categories in which sources are distributed: direct visitors, visitors from organic search and referrals.
- Direct visitors will be those who came to the site by typing in the browser the site's URL;
- Visitors from organic search are those who arrive on the site after a search on search engines;
- Referrals are the ones who visited your site from a different source such as social networks, a blog that wrote about you, etc.
All three sources are very important, but have different levels of conversion. That's why you should calculate how much each traffic source converts and then act on these numbers.
1. Conversions are from new visitors or from uniques?
It's vital to know this, because visitors who have been on your site will interact with you differently than those who visit your site for the first time. If you want to improve the experience for new visitors, you need to isolate the conversion rate of loyal clients or returning visitors.
Isolate these data, you will be able to find the source of new visitors, what they see first when they arrive on the site (what page or article) and what actions you can take to improve their initial visit.
2. Bounce rate
The bounce rate can be defined as the time spent by new visitors on the site until you leave without having any activity on your site. Which means no interaction, no viewing, no clicks. If you have a high rejection rate, it can be an indication of many things including irrelevant traffic sources, high charging times, unpleasant landing pages, or poorly organized pages.
Generally blogs will see that they have a high bounce rate. This is because visitors tend to read one article on the site and then move on.
3. Output pages
Often the conversion is not derived from the homepage. Often the completion of the order will be done on another page. This information is usually tracked within a built funnel. Follow on which page the customer has gone from the site to see at what stage of the buying process he has dropped it. When you find out, you can make some changes on that page.
In general, visitors are advised to not walk on too many pages until conversion, because they will get bored and leave. The process should be as simple as possible.