Your total website visits graph is an unactionable metric
Have you ever had this experience talking to the person who does your website's analytics? (I've not only had this experience, I used to deliver this reporting fallacy).
"What you have here is your visits graph, showing that visits are holding steady (or rising, or falling, or whatever)."
Unless you've got a number of traffic-driving campaigns running, this graph doesn't mean anything. It's a combination of actionable analytics rolled up into one big un-actionable one. I had my own moment of epiphany about this when I presented this graph to a favorite client who had no blog outreach, no managed advertising, and no active SEO campaigns going. I showed her the graph of visits and she said, "Is that good?"
The answer is it doesn't matter. If you don't have a plan to generate visitor traffic, checking the visits you've got is even less meaningful than checking for rain. So let's say you've seen the light and want to turn this into an Actionable metric, what do you do?
Step 1: Look deeper at your Search traffic
The first step should be to look at the components that make up your visits. Most analytics products break these up into "Direct Traffic", "Referral Traffic", and "Search Engine Traffic". Search Engine traffic is a great example of this. Your search engine traffic is probably one fourth to one third of your traffic. Even if you don't have a paid search campaign going, you need to keep an eye on this. Here's the search engine driven traffic graph for my personal website (www.safdar.net) from Jan. 2009 to Jan 2010:
If you look carefully, you'll see a long term trend of decline over the last 12 months with that spike earlier in the year. This clearly means I need to pay attention to my search engine rank if I want to continue bringing traffic into the site, but even this graph is deceiving. What I really need to see is the report of which keywords are increasing in traffic, and which are dropping. That's easily enough done with the "Compare to past" function in Google analytics. Here's the data for my personal blog:
An article I wrote last year about the season finale of Battlestar Galactica was the biggest driver of traffic, but has since plummeted. (Oh, the nerd in me is revealed!) This trend on my blog follows the larger, worldwide trend of declining interest in the series now that it's concluded, as I've shown here with Google Insights for Search:
Other phrases are rising. If I wanted to continually drive traffic to this site, I should examine the phrases that are increasing in traffic, and develop more articles similar to them. See how that works? When the results of an analytic measurement can be acted upon, it is actionable.
Step 2: Look deeper at your referral traffic
Your referral traffic, once you remove search engines from it, is a sign of your link-popularity on the web. Let's look at an example of my referral traffic from Google Analytics with a focus on source and landing page:
When you look at your referral traffic, you can learn what's actually working at sending you traffic. This shows that some of the images I post get indexed by Google, and that they drive traffic to my website. (Remember that next time you're writing something, a compelling photo can draw in visitors!) The knowledge that this drives traffic is what drives me to include posts with my blog posts. (That's actionable!)
Another thing to look for in this report would be links from other sites, like my first link from www.pokerstove.com. That link is an enormous driver of traffic for me. I worked with that site owner to place that link on purpose, but if it happens that I got that link just because he liked an article I wrote, I would want to plan to write more articles of that style, to give him more meaningful things to link to.
Step 3: Rinse, Lather, Repeat (the actionable items)
You don't need to spend a lot of time looking at your analytics every week, just look at what's successfully driving traffic to your site, learn from it, and incorporate that knowledge into your work every week. Simple actionable things like attaching photos to all your blog posts, identifying keywords that are working, and cultivating relationships with the sites that send you traffic are simple things you can do in a few minutes every week, and will help your long term traffic trends.
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