Who is sending you online customers?

This is a great time of the year to analyze your website and where your website traffic is really coming from. A great tool to do this is Google Analytics, which is a FREE web tool from Google to help you monitor your website performance. It will also tell you what websites are sending potential customers to your website.  This is commonly called: Referrers or Referring websites.

With Google Analytics we can see all the other websites, by name, who have sent us traffic over a given time period. This can help you understand not only where your referring traffic is coming from but also help you when working with suppliers and online advertising agencies. Instead of taking their word for how much traffic they say they are sending to your website, now you can see the actual results yourself. For example, you can see how many people came from your various suppliers' store locators. Or, if you have an advertising program with AT&T or Superpages online you can determine if you are getting your monies worth by how many users are actually coming from there to your website. (You can also see if they are coming from Facebook or Twitter to your website too.) Below is an example of what the report looks like.

If you don't have Google Analytics I would recommend signing up for it and have it installed on all pages of your website. Remember it is FREE!

For those with supplier templated websites you should sign up for Google Analytics and tell them you want the Google code snippet inserted into your website so you can see for yourself how your website is performing. Most templated websites use a MasterPage so it only needs to be inserted in one page to monitor all the pages within your website. Since you are paying for the website they should be happy to do this for you.

Another way to view what websites your web visitors are coming from in Google Analytics is by going to Top Content in the menu.  Then select a page from the top content page listing, probably your home page. From there go to the Analyze drop down box and select "Entrance Sources".  This will give you a complete listing of websites that people came from to that web page on your website. It can be very eye-opening and is a great way to see who is sending you traffic over a specific time period. See the screenshot below for how it will look.

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