In this article
Think of Marketing Channels as the sources of traffic. This report provides valuable insights around where a website's traffic is coming from, which helps you discover which channels are successfully driving users to your site as well as your competitors.
The Marketing Channels report allows you to...
-
Evaluate your website's digital performance by analyzing web traffic volume and engagement metrics across marketing channels.
- It showcases opportunities to grow your traffic share across a competitive set.
- Find out where your competitors are reliant on for traffic, aka which sources drive a lot of visits to their sites.
- Plan and prioritize marketing resources by analyzing the leading channels generating traffic for your competitors and industry leaders.
-
Get an overview of brand awareness by looking at direct and organic traffic sources.
-
View geographical market shares by setting the country filter to focus your analysis on desired markets.
- Reveal the quantity and quality of traffic sent to a site(s) per traffic source.
-
Roughly gauge how much competitor brands are spending on their own digital marketing efforts by analyzing their traffic from paid search, display ads, and others.
- And so much more!
To view the traffic performance of up to 5 websites, follow these steps:
-
Go to the Website Analysis module. Enter a website and navigate to the Marketing Channels page.
-
To target your analysis,
-
Click +Compare to add up to four additional sites.
-
Use the filters in the upper right to set the time period, country, and type of traffic (desktop, mobile web, or all traffic) that you would like to analyze.
-
Note: For a deeper dive into each channel, click the link to each channel in the overview graph.
With the Channels Overview graph, you can identify the leading channels generating traffic to your website and your competitors. Compare traffic volumes to identify channels where you are losing out to the competition and uncover opportunities to grow your traffic.
Marketing Channels:
Note: The data includes a breakdown of each channel's traffic visits, which are truncated to 10,000 results. When you analyze data over a long period of time for a website(s) with a lot of different traffic sources, a minor discrepancy in traffic may be observed (in these instances, it's smaller than 0.05%, much less than half a percent).
Tip: Along with absolute numbers, look at percentages to understand the volume and proportion of traffic driven by each channel. When using data that's desktop only, you can also benchmark against the industry to see channel traffic relative to the entire industry.
By default, ‘All Traffic’ is set for this report, which includes desktop and mobile web traffic (this does not include mobile app traffic). When you hover over each traffic source, you can see the desktop/mobile web ratio of traffic.
Growth Drivers and Marketing Focus Changes
Visualize the changes of traffic from each marketing channel across an entire competitive set. Both of these charts focus on year-over-year growth.
With the Growth Drivers chart, you'll see the actual change in visits, including a total change (from all channels) along the top row. This is a great way to monitor the concrete impact a channel is having on each site being analyzed, and answers the real-world impact. For example, in the screenshot below, J Crew sees an almost 2M increase from Organic Search. Interestingly, they're the only brand seeing an overall increase in traffic, which potentially indicates that their new SEO strategy is helping drive a lot of success to their site.
Meanwhile, the Marketing Focus chart provides these changes in percentages. Seeing a percentage change is crucial to understand the efficiency or momentum each of the channels are having on each of the sites in analysis. It guides in assessing traffic performance for each site. For example, using the same screenshot below, seeing that Paid Search traffic for Express is down 64% is a potential indicator of two things: either their paid ad strategy is not hitting the mark, or they may have decreased their paid search efforts altogether.
In Channel Traffic, you can analyze the quality of visitor traffic per channel. Filter the graph by Marketing Channel and engagement metric for a more granular analysis. (Note: you must have the device source set to Desktop for these insights.)
Key metrics & insights:
Marketing Channel Trends
View quick and easy-to-digest insights on significant fluctuations and traffic trends in key marketing channels. The insights can be used as a starting point to begin analyzing traffic changes over time and you can drill deeper into those changes to understand the ‘why’. It provides insights into your competitors’ channel traffic performance.
Marketing channel trends allows you to:
-
Understand recent changes in acquisition channels to get actionable insights toward your own digital marketing strategy.
-
Stay informed of competitors’ acquisition strategy to ensure competitive advantage.
-
Often traffic volume on one channel overshadows all other channels, and it's difficult to gain real insights at a glance - this highlights significant channel movements without having to dig them out.
Notes:
-
Insights are calculated, and therefore only visible, for channels that exceed 50,000 visits for the whole time period.
-
Increase/decrease insights are displayed if the change is >10% month over month.
-
Trend insights are qualified by >5% growth/decline for the previous 3 consecutive months.
Period over Period Comparisons
All Marketing Channel graphs are supported with Period over Period analysis.
This will allow you to see period over period growth/decline of your competitor’s traffic acquisition channels in terms of a percentage. Identify which player is growing in which channel, and gain insight on where there has been more resources or investment made in a particular channel by those competitors.
You will be able to select the desired period to compare against based on your requirements: month over month, quarter over quarter, specific periods, or year over year.
As well as the above, the period over period analysis allows you to:
-
See changes in average growth per channel for an industry.
-
Show traffic sources that are new for the latest period, traffic sources that are no longer being leveraged, traffic sources that have grown/dropped but are still sending traffic for both periods.
-
See growth/decline in absolute numbers and in growth % for engagement metrics per channel.
Try it now! Website Analysis > Enter a website and go to the Marketing Channels module.
Comments
Please sign in to leave a comment.