When you put your business online, there’s multiple different channels your customers can come through. That’s one thing. Knowing which channels are funneling the most people your way is another – and it’s important to be up to date on how these are working for you.
After all, you need to know what’s going right in your marketing campaign. Knowing the where and when keeps you in the loop.
But before we get into any of that, let’s start with the basics. When you have a website and you want it to be discovered, how are visitors likely to find it?
Via Search Engines
The number one place that someone might come across your website. If you’ve tapped into SEO methods, you’re likely to start showing up when people ‘google’ related keywords and search terms.
And seeing as billions of searches happen every single day, with around 570 million occurring every hour, it’s not hard to see that the sheer quantity of searches puts your website in a pretty good position.
Via Social Media
Social media is one of the kings of discoverability in the online world. No matter how much time someone spends scrolling through their feed, you’ve got a chance to pop up and connect with them.
And when you do, it’s easier to know about it than if they’d found you via a search engine. You can use different integrated tools to track things like your instagram recent followers, what posts are performing well, and how much time people are spending on your page.
Through Recommendations
Now, you might hear about this, you might not. But sometimes, people can still find you the good, old fashioned way: recommended by a friend! Or alternatively, recommended by a review, or a comment left on a social post or blog.
Recommendations are incredibly high quality, but they’re also very hard to both encourage and track. You need to provide a stellar user experience and customer service to start earning recommendations, and everyone has their own opinion on what those are!
Why You Need to Know
So, why is it important to understand where your website visitors are coming from?
There’s a few different reasons. But to us, these are the most prominent:
For successful marketing efforts
No point spending money on marketing in the wrong place!
For example, if you get low to no traffic from social media, it might not be the best place to put your ads, sponsored posts, and user outreach efforts.
So you can make changes ASAP
If a marketing campaign isn’t bringing in what it’s supposed to, you need to either adapt or remove it as quickly as possible.
But if you don’t know where your visitors tend to come from, every single campaign is likely to turn out to be a dud!
When you know where people are finding your website, you give yourself a real marketing advantage. Track channels, stay involved, and don’t waste resources on marketing that doesn’t work.

