Another very useful piece of information you can glean from your website statistics is how visitors are finding your site. For instance, are they typing the web address in directly, or finding it via a search engine or some other site? This data is useful because you can track which sites refer traffic.

If you're using Google Analytics, all of this and more can be found in the Traffic Sources section. On the overview page is a simplified pie chart displaying Direct Traffic (those who typed in your address or clicked on a bookmark/favorite), Searc Engine traffic, and other Referring Sites. This last group contains visitors who came by clicking on a link to your site from some non-search engine site, such as a directory, a colleague's site, Facebook, etc. Please note Twitter is often not listed here due to the funky way they shorten URL's. I'll write more about this in a future post, it's enough for now to know that Twitter links often appear in the "Direct" category, so don't be frustrated if you don't see them listed as highly as you expect.

Do you pay for advertising on other websites? You don't need to rely on their honesty in reporting, you can look at your own referring sites to verify the number of times a visitor came from that website to yours. But wait, there's more! By creating an advanced segment that filters your logs to only analyze visitors from that particular source, you can profile the traffic that's coming from your paid advertising on a particular site. You can now see if they are spending quality time on your website, how many pages they view, which pages are the most popular, and even if they follow through with a purchase or other online call-to-action. This gives you a good indicator of whether you're spending your online advertising budget in a worthwhile marketing campaign. Pretty nifty, eh?