Understanding Traffic Sources

In a couple of posts recently, I have talked about setting up online referrer campaigns to track where your traffic is coming from, and then how to look at individual web visitors and understand where they were last referred from.

This data is also very interesting looked at in aggregate in order to understand which of your online sources are driving the most traffic. To do this in Eloqua is quick and simple. In the web profiling -> Referrers area, choose the channel (such as Online Media) that you want to understand better and select the "View Marketing Campaign Breakdown" option. This will show you all of the campaigns you have configured under that channel, and give you a breakdown of those campaigns by the traffic that they have sourced.


The resulting report, of course, can be added to email updates or custom dashboards, to give you an ongoing sense of where your traffic is coming from. In our case, for example, we learned that our discussions on Twitter were sourcing more traffic than we had anticipated (although yes, the data to the left has been slightly disguised...).

By setting up tracking for relevant blogs that have high profile links to your site, you can gain an understanding of whether those references are driving traffic, and how much. In our case, I learned that Valeria Maltoni's Conversation Agent, Adam Needles Propelling Brands, and Jep Castelein's Lead Sloth were interesting sources of traffic to Digital Body Language recently.