Organisation & tools

Where does your traffic come from?— what your site analytics should tell you

And now?

Taken on its own, that figure tells you almost nothing. You could have 10,000 visitors and receive no enquiries; or only 300 visitors, 20 of whom become people genuinely interested in your services.

The number of visits is a piece of information.

It is not yet an answer.

For an analytics tool to become genuinely useful, it should help you understand something far more important:

“How do the right people reach you — and what makes them continue?”

Your traffic is not one single thing

When you look at a site’s statistics, it is tempting to start with the total number of visitors. Those visitors did not all arrive for the same reason.

Some searched for you directly on Google; others discovered one of your articles, arrived from Instagram or LinkedIn, followed a campaign link or simply typed your name after a recommendation.

Others still may have landed on a page that has almost nothing to do with your main offer.

Putting all those visits into a single figure is a way of mixing very different behaviours, intentions and levels of interest.

The first thing your analytics should be able to tell you is simply:

“Where do the people who arrive on your site actually come from?”

Understanding the source already changes a great deal

Imagine that your site receives 2,000 visits a month.

You invest a great deal of time in Instagram and notice that the network brings you 800 visits. Google, for its part, brings only 350.

At first glance, Instagram looks like your best channel.

Look a little further, though.

Of the 800 visits from Instagram, 12 people look at your service page and only one sends an enquiry. Of the 350 visits from Google, 110 look at that same page and 18 ask to work with you.

The reading changes completely.

Instagram brings you more traffic; Google brings you more intention.

Which means that a question such as:

“Which channel brings me the most visitors?”

is often less interesting than:

“Which channel brings me the visitors most interested in my offer?”

That is where analytics starts to become a genuine commercial tool.

More traffic is not always the aim

That is particularly true for a premium business.

An independent who can take on ten new clients a month does not necessarily need 50,000 visitors; they need to be discovered by enough people who actually match their clientele.

The distinction looks obvious. A large part of digital marketing still puts forward figures of volume: more views, more visitors, more followers, more clicks.

Those indicators can be useful, but they do not automatically tell you whether your business is moving forward.

For some businesses, going from 1,000 to 700 visitors while doubling the number of qualified enquiries would be excellent news.

The right traffic is worth more than a lot of traffic.

The entry page tells part of the story

Not all of your visitors arrive on the homepage.

Someone can discover your business directly from a blog article, a service page, a piece of work, a local page, a Google search or a link shared on a social network.

That page then becomes their first contact with your universe; it has to be able to work even if the person has never seen your homepage.

Imagine that one of your articles attracts 40% of your organic traffic.

That is excellent news.

But if almost nobody then continues towards your services, several questions become interesting: does the subject actually attract your target clientele? Is the link to your services natural enough? Does the article answer a search too far from your offer? Does the reader understand what your business does? Is there a logical next step after reading?

Analytics does not always give you the answer directly.

It shows you where to ask the question.

And that distinction is important.

A figure is not a conclusion

This is probably one of the most frequent mistakes when looking at statistics.

A page has a high exit rate; you conclude that it is bad.

Not necessarily.

If that page contains your contact details and the visitor then taps your phone number, leaving the page may be exactly what you wanted.

An article is read for several minutes, then the person leaves.

A failure?

Not necessarily. They may have obtained exactly the information they were looking for.

Conversely, someone can look at eight pages because they cannot find what they are looking for at all.

Eight page views do not automatically mean eight signs of interest.

A metric only makes sense when you put it back in the aim of the page.

Before measuring something, you need to know what that page is supposed to accomplish.

Not every page has the same job

A homepage can exist to present the business and orient people; a service page should make an offer understandable; a portfolio should reassure through proof; an article should answer a question and possibly invite further discovery; a contact page should make it easy to get in touch.

A members’ area, for its part, may exist to bring an existing client back.

Measuring each of these pages only by the number of visits would not make much sense.

It is better to ask:

“Which action would show that this page is doing its job?”

And that is where events become interesting.

Measure the actions that actually matter

A visit is a piece of data; it is not necessarily the most interesting one.

Depending on your business, you might want to know how many people look at an offer, open a piece of work, click “Request a quote”, start a form, send that form, book an appointment, download a resource or create an account.

You can then start to build a much clearer reading.

For example:

540 visitors from Google
↓
172 views of a service page
↓
41 form openings
↓
18 enquiries sent

That picture teaches you far more than:

“540 Google visitors.”

You start to see where interest turns into something — or gets lost.

The form is often an excellent reveal

Imagine now that 80 people open your quote form, but only 12 send it.

Something is happening.

Does the form ask for too much information? Is it difficult to use on a phone? Are you asking for a budget before the person understands your prices? Is there a technical problem? Does the button work properly? Does an important condition appear too late in the journey?

Analytics cannot answer all of those questions on its own; without measurement, though, you might never know the problem exists.

You would simply notice:

“My site receives visits, but few people contact me.”

With the right data, the question becomes much more precise:

“A lot of people seem to want to contact me, but a large share drop off at the form. Why?”

And a precise question is much easier to solve.

Your most visited pages are not necessarily your most important ones

Another mistake is to rank content only by popularity.

Your most-read article can generate a great deal of traffic and very little business; meanwhile a much less visited page can be looked at almost systematically by the people who end up contacting you.

That second page can have far more commercial value.

Take an example.

The article is much more popular; the service page is much closer to the decision.

You need both.

But you should not evaluate them in the same way.

Content can attract before it sells

That is particularly interesting for SEO.

Someone searching “Why isn’t my site converting?” may not yet be searching “bespoke website design studio”.

They are earlier in their thinking.

Your article can give them an answer, let them discover your approach and, possibly, make them want to go further.

The role of content is not always to generate an immediate conversion; it can also create a qualified first contact.

That is why measuring only the journey article → immediate quote request would give too limited a view.

The buying journey, especially for a premium service, can take time; someone can discover your work today and contact you several weeks later.

So can you follow a potential client’s whole journey?

Technically, a great many tools now make it possible to go a long way in tracking behaviour.

But the real question is not:

“How far can we follow someone?”

It is:

“How far do we actually need to go to take better decisions?”

Those are two very different things.

To understand that a page works, you do not necessarily need to know the identity of everyone who visited it. To know that a campaign attracts qualified traffic, you do not need to build a detailed profile of each visitor; and to notice that a form creates friction, you do not need to look individually at everything a person has done on your site.

Understanding collective behaviour does not mean watching each individual.

And that distinction is essential.

Cookie-free analytics: is it possible?

Yes.

There are now solutions able to measure an important part of a site’s activity without using cookies to create a persistent history of each visitor.

Depending on the tool and its configuration, it is possible, among other things, to measure page views, traffic sources, entry pages, campaigns, certain events, conversions, devices or browsers and certain aggregated geographic information.

This approach obviously has limits.

If you deliberately choose not to identify a browser over time, you will not necessarily be able to say:

“This person came on Monday from Google, came back on Thursday from Instagram then sent a form on Friday.”

But do you really need to know that?

In a great many businesses, no.

You mainly need to understand what attracts, what interests, what converts and what blocks.

We will devote a whole article to cookie-free analytics, because the subject deserves to be taken further.

Cookie-free does not automatically mean “GDPR-free”

That is an important nuance.

Removing cookies is not, on its own, enough to guarantee that an analytics system is compliant. GDPR is not only about cookies; it is more broadly about the processing of personal data.

Depending on the tool chosen, its configuration, the information collected, its purpose, its retention period, the recipients or any data transfers, the obligations can be different.

The rules on trackers and on storing or accessing information on a device also need to be examined separately.

In other words:

“cookie-free” is a technical characteristic.

It is not, on its own, a compliance strategy.

The aim should remain to choose the data that is actually useful, to limit what is collected and to inform visitors properly according to the processing in place.

UTMs: small pieces of information that can answer large questions

You may already have seen very long links containing elements such as utm_source, utm_medium or utm_campaign.

Those parameters simply indicate where a click comes from.

Imagine that you publish the same link to your site in your Instagram bio, a newsletter, an advertisement or a collaboration with a partner.

Without specific identification, several visits can be hard to distinguish precisely; with a coherent UTM structure, you can know which campaign or which placement generated the click.

That becomes particularly interesting when you invest time or money in acquisition.

You can then start to answer questions such as: which campaign actually generates visits? Which newsletter pushes readers towards my offer? Which partnership works? Which advertisement generates enquiries rather than simply clicks?

Once again, the aim is not to know who clicked.

The aim is to know what works.

Your dashboard should not force you to become an analyst

There are tools capable of displaying dozens, even hundreds of metrics: sessions, users, events, engagement, channels, cohorts, attribution, conversions, dimensions, segments…

All of that can have a use.

But if you open your dashboard once a month and do not know what to look at, the system has missed part of its purpose.

A good dashboard should answer quickly the questions that matter for your business: how many people came? Where did they come from? Which pages interest them? Which important actions did they take? Which sources generate those actions? Which content attracts qualified traffic? Where is there unusual friction?

Then, only if an anomaly appears, you can go further into the detail.

Analytics should help you understand; not give you the impression that you need a training course before you can read your own site.

Watch out for figures that flatter

Some data are pleasant to look at: 10,000 visits, 50,000 impressions, 2,000 clicks, +120% traffic.

They can be perfectly real.

But an impressive metric is not automatically a useful metric.

Imagine that your traffic increases by 200% after publishing an article.

Excellent.

Except that this article mainly attracts people located in a country where you do not work, interested in a subject that matches none of your offers.

You have gained traffic.

You have not necessarily gained value.

That is why a useful dashboard should avoid becoming a collection of vanity metrics.

The aim is not to produce beautiful figures; the aim is to understand your business.

Look also at what evolves over time

An isolated figure is rarely as interesting as a trend.

You received 15 enquiries this month.

Is that a lot?

Impossible to know without context.

If you usually received 4, something is working; if you used to receive 40, something has changed in the other direction.

The analysis becomes more useful when you compare this month with the previous one, a period with the same period the year before when the business is seasonal, or the results before and after a change to the site, a campaign or regular content publication.

The aim is not to look at the statistics every morning; for a great many independents, that would even be counter-productive.

It is rather a matter of creating enough visibility to spot the changes that deserve your attention.

Traffic can also help you improve your offer

Analytics is not only a marketing tool; it can also reveal interesting things about your clientele and your offer.

A secondary service systematically attracts more interest than expected; a page you considered essential is barely looked at; an article on a precise problem regularly attracts your target clientele; a new offer receives a lot of visits but almost no enquiries.

These signals should not automatically dictate your decisions.

But they can feed your thinking.

Data does not replace your knowledge of the work.

It gives it another angle.

The right data is the data that can change a decision

Before adding a metric to your dashboard, ask yourself a question:

“What could I decide differently thanks to this information?”

If you cannot find any answer, you may not need to look at it regularly.

The source of enquiries can help you decide where to invest your time or your budget; the service pages viewed can reveal which offers actually generate interest; the completion rate of a form can signal friction in getting in touch; the articles that attract qualified traffic can orient your SEO strategy; the devices used can, for their part, reveal the importance of certain mobile improvements.

Conversely:

“I had 1,742 page views.”

Fine.

But which decision does that information let you take?

That is the question that gradually separates the data from useful information.

Start with five questions

If you have never really looked at the analytics of your site, there is no need to start with fifty indicators.

Start with five questions.

1. Where does my traffic come from?
   Google, social networks, direct access, campaigns, partners…
2. On which pages do visitors arrive?
   You will discover the real entry doors of your site.
3. Which pages or offers generate interest?
   Not only those that receive a lot of visits, but those that lead towards an important action.
4. Which actions actually matter for my business?
   Quote request, booking, account creation, sign-up, download…
5. Where does there seem to be friction?
   A much-visited page that is rarely followed by an action, a form often started but rarely finished, a campaign generating a lot of clicks but no enquiries…

Those five answers are already enough to look at your site differently.

Your site should be able to teach you something

A site should not only be a presence you put online and then forget.

It receives visitors who arrive by different paths, look at certain things, ignore others, move forward, hesitate and, sometimes, contact you.

All of those behaviours contain information that can help you improve your digital presence.

No need to collect everything; no need to follow everything and certainly no need to know each individual behind each click.

You mainly need to know which questions you want to be able to ask your site.

At by Noreliam, we think about analytics in this way: start from the decisions you need to take, then determine the data actually necessary to answer them.

Because a dashboard full of figures is not necessarily intelligent.

Good analytics should above all let you understand what deserves your attention.