Traffic Sources

Traffic Breakdown

The “Traffic Breakdown” report provides an overview of the sources of your website traffic by category (Referring Sites, Direct Traffic, and Search Engines), the percentage of visitors (excluding bots and crawlers) who accessed your website from each source category, and the number of unique visitors for each category. Referring Sites are visitors who visited your website through a link on another site. Direct Traffic are visitors who manually entered the URL of your website in the address bar. Search Engines are visitors that came to your website through a search engine, for example Google.

Top Referrers

The “Top Referrers” report includes the number of visitors to your website and the URL of the site from which they navigated to your website. Here you can also see how many times a visitor clicked on your link from the referrers website.

Top Referrer - Details

The “Top Referrers - Details” report is similar to the “Top Referrers” report, but also includes the parameters sent from the referring site in the referrer column. Parameters, or query strings, contain the values of a specific link, separated from the address portion of the URL of the page that we are navigating to by a question mark (?). The following is an example of a full query string, including both the address of the site and the parameter:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=awstats&aq=f&oq=&aqi=n1g10

The parameter portion of this query string is:

?hl=en&source=hp&q=awstats&aq=f&oq=&aqi=n1g10

The information provided in this parameter indicates that the referrer came from a Google results page after searching for the keyword “awstats”.

Referrer Trends

With the “Referrer Trends” report you can follow the visitor trends from your best referrers closely. Just select a certain date range and view the results in a table or graph. The search function in the report options makes it possible to zoom in on (a) specific referrer(s).

Top Keywords

The “Top Keywords” report displays the number of visitors who used a particular keyword to navigate to your website and the total number of requests. The search function of this report makes it possible to filter the results. Clicking on a keyword shows an action menu, from here you can investigate the particular keyword in great detail. Take a look, for example, at the landing pages associated with the keyword.

Top Keyword - Details

The “Top Keywords - Details” report displays the number of visitors who used a particular keyword to navigate to your website, the number of times that an individual visitor clicked through to your site using a particular keyword, the number of page views and the referring site. This report also includes any query string parameters that were included in the URL used to link to your site.

Keyword Trends

With “Keyword Trends” you can follow the visitor trends from your best keywords closely. Just select a certain date range and view the results in a table or graph. The search function in the report options makes it possible to zoom in on a specific keyword.

Search Engines

The “Search Engines” report includes the names of search engines from which visitors navigated to your website (such as Google, Yahoo, or Bing), the number of visitors who used that search engine, the number of hits from that search engine, and the number of searches per user. This report shows which search engines brought the most visitors to your website. Since different search engines use different methods of ordering their search results, this report may indicate that you need to make changes in order to help your site appear higher in search results, or that you may need to focus on increasing traffic from particular search engines.

Search Engine Trends

The “Search Engine Trends” report displays the trends in traffic you get from your top referring search engines.

Google Rankings

The “Google Rankings” report shows you the Google result pages on which your website was found for any particular keyword within this date range (i.e 1st result page, second result page. etc.). The report includes the keywords used in the search criteria, the number of visitors who arrived at your site using those keywords, and the search result page from which they were referred. In this article you can find more information on how to get a better Google Ranking.

Social Media

The “Social Media” report shows the number of visitors that came to your website via which social media platform.

Social Media Trends

The “Social Media” report shows the development of visitor numbers that came to your website via a social media platform.