Understand why your website traffic fluctuates

One of the best things about online marketing is the ability to measure how your actions affect your website visitor numbers - something that is often difficult with offline campaigns.

I've mentioned in the past about our use of Google Analytics. At PropertyADD, all customer websites have the tracking installed by default and it's a great way for them to monitor leads from portals such as Globrix who forward traffic on.

However, although you can see whether traffic is growing or falling, it was still sometimes difficult to be able to understand why.

And that 'why' is the most important bit!

Last Friday, Google finally confirmed the rollout of an annoucement made before Christmas: annotations. Annotations allow you to add notes to your timeline about when you made key design changes, started a new blog, ran particular campaigns, published new content, or the like.

If you're suddenly seeing a rise in visitors using a particular search term on Google, using annotations can help you pinpoint the advert that you ran that week. Over time they will help give you a more complete picture of why your traffic fluctuates.

Here's a video that the Google Analytics team posted on Google to explain the benefits:



It's only a little improvement, but it's a good one!