Which Mediums Are Available In Google Analytics

A Complete Guide to Google Analytics

Understanding Media in Google Analytics

Introduction

Google Analytics is a powerful tool that helps website owners and digital marketers understand how visitors find and interact with their websites. An important aspect of this analysis is understanding the concept of media. Mediums are general categories that describe the source of your website traffic. By analyzing media, you can measure the effectiveness of various marketing strategies and optimize your efforts to drive more traffic and conversions.

In this guide, we will explore the various channels available in Google Analytics, their definitions, examples and practical applications. We’ll also discuss how to set up and use custom media to gain more detailed insight into your traffic sources.

Why media matters

Media understanding is important for several reasons:

• Traffic Analytics: Media provides a high-level overview of where your traffic is coming from.
• Campaign Tracking: They help you track the performance of different marketing campaigns.
• Optimization: By analyzing media, you can identify which channels are most effective and allocate resources accordingly.
• Custom Reporting: Media allows for detailed segmentation and custom reporting, providing deeper insights into user behavior.

Default media in Google Analytics

Organic search

Description

Organic search refers to traffic coming to your website from non-populated search engine results. This medium is important for understanding how well your website is performing in search engine rankings.

Examples

• Google search results
• Bing search results
• Yahoo search results
• DuckDuckGo search results

usage

Organic search traffic is a key indicator of your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) efforts. By analyzing this medium, you can determine how effectively your website is ranking for relevant keywords and phrases. It is also useful for identifying trends in search behavior and optimizing your content strategy accordingly.

Good practice

• Keyword Research: Conduct keyword research regularly to identify new opportunities for organic traffic.
• On-Page SEO: Optimize your website’s content, meta tags and internal linking structure to improve search engine visibility.
• Backlink Building: Get high-quality backlinks to increase your site’s authority and improve its ranking.

live

Description

Direct traffic includes visitors who come to your site without a referring source. This usually means they typed your URL directly into the browser or used a bookmark.

Examples

• Typing www.yoursite.com directly into the browser
• Clicking on a bookmark
• Clicking on links in non-web-based documents, such as PDF or Word documents

usage

Direct traffic usually represents loyal visitors or those familiar with your brand. Analyzing direct traffic can help you understand the strength of your brand and the effectiveness of your offline marketing efforts.

Good practice

• Brand Awareness Campaigns: Invest in brand awareness campaigns to drive direct traffic.
• Offline Marketing: Use offline marketing strategies, such as print ads and brochures, to drive direct traffic.
• Customer Retention: Focus on customer retention strategies to convert one-time visitors into repeat visitors.

Referral

Description

Referral traffic comes from links on other websites. This tool helps you identify which external sources are driving traffic to your site.

Examples

• Links in blog posts
• Directory listing
• News articles linking to your site
• Partner Websites

usage

Referral traffic is valuable for understanding the impact of external content and partnerships. It can also help you identify high-performing referral sources that you may want to leverage further.

Good practice

• Content Marketing: Engage in content marketing strategies to get backlinks from reputable sites.
• Partnerships: Develop partnerships with other websites to increase referral traffic.
• Monitor Backlinks: Use tools to monitor your backlinks and make sure they are coming from high-quality sources.

Paid Search

Description

Paid search traffic originates from search engine advertising. This includes traffic from pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns such as Google Ads.

Examples

• Google Ads
• Bing Ads
• Yahoo Gemini Ads

usage

Paid search is key to evaluating the ROI of your PPC campaigns. By analyzing this medium, you can determine the effectiveness of your ads, keywords, and bidding strategies.

Good practice

• Keyword Optimization: Continually optimize your keywords to improve ad relevance and reduce costs.
• Ad Copy: Check and refine your ad copy to increase click-through rate (CTR).
• Landing Pages: Make sure your landing pages are optimized for conversions to increase the effectiveness of your paid search campaigns.

Email

Description

Email traffic is generated by links in email marketing campaigns. This tool helps you track the performance of your email efforts.

Examples

• Newsletter links
• Promotional email links
• Automated email campaigns

usage

Email traffic is essential to understanding the engagement and effectiveness of your email marketing strategies. By analyzing this medium, you can measure open rates, click-through rates, and conversions.

Good practice

• Segmentation: Split your email list to send targeted and relevant content to different audience groups.
• Personalization: Personalize your emails to increase engagement and conversions.
• A/B Testing: Conduct A/B testing on email subject lines, content and calls-to-action to optimize performance.

Social

Description

Social traffic comes from social media platforms. This medium includes both organic and paid social media traffic.

Examples

• Facebook
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Instagram
• Pinterest

usage

Social traffic is critical to measuring the impact of your social media activities. By analyzing this medium, you can identify which platforms have the most traffic and engagement.

Good practice

• Content Strategy: Develop a strong content strategy for each social media platform.
• Engage: Engage with your audience through comments, shares and likes to increase visibility.
• Paid Social: Invest in paid social media campaigns to increase reach and drive targeted traffic.

Display

Description

Display traffic is from display ads, such as banner ads, video ads, or other forms of graphical ads.

Examples

• Google Display Network Ads
• Banner ads on websites
• Video ads on YouTube

usage

Display advertising is useful for brand awareness and reaching a wider audience. By analyzing this medium, you can evaluate the performance of your display campaigns and optimize them for better results.

Good practice

• Targeting: Use precise targeting options to reach the right audience with your display ads.
• Creative Design: Make sure your ad creative is visually appealing and relevant to your audience.
• Remarketing: Implement remarketing strategies to re-engage visitors who have previously interacted with your site.

attached

Description

Affiliate traffic comes from links provided by affiliate partners who promote your site in exchange for a commission.

Examples

• Affiliate website links
• Blog links that earn commission on sales

usage

Affiliate marketing is an effective way to increase your reach and increase conversions. By analyzing this medium, you can identify high-performing affiliates and optimize your affiliate program.

Good practice

• Affiliate Recruitment: Recruit relevant audiences and affiliates with a strong online presence.
• Commission Structure: Develop a competitive commission structure to incentivize affiliates.
• Performance Tracking: Monitor affiliate performance regularly to identify top performers and areas for improvement.

Others

Description

Other media serves as a catch-all for traffic that doesn’t fit standard media. This often includes custom-defined media.

Examples

• Custom campaign links with UTM parameters, such as utm_medium=example

usage

This medium allows tailored tracking and analysis of specific marketing campaigns and unique traffic sources. It is useful for capturing non-standard traffic sources and custom campaigns.

Good practice

• UTM Parameters: Use UTM parameters to create custom media to track specific campaigns.
• Campaign Segmentation: Segment your campaigns by custom media to gain deeper insights.
• Custom Reports: Create custom reports in Google Analytics to analyze the performance of custom media.

Custom media

Description

Custom Media are user-defined categories for better segmentation and analysis of traffic. They allow you to tailor your tracking to match your specific marketing efforts and goals.

Examples

• paid_social for paid social media campaigns
• native_ads for native ad campaigns

Usage

Custom media provides finer insights and better control over how different types of traffic are classified and analyzed. By setting up custom means, you can track the performance of specific campaigns and specific traffic sources.

Setting up custom media

Step by Step Guide

1. Define Your Media: Decide on a custom media name that matches your tracking needs. For example, email_newsletter for your newsletter campaigns.

2. Use UTM Parameters: Add UTM parameters to your URL, specifying a custom medium.

• Example: https://www.yoursite.com?utm_medium=email_newsletter&utm_source=newsletter&utm_campaign=summer_sale

3. Analyze Data: Use Google Analytics to analyze traffic data related to your custom media.

Good practice

• Consistency: Ensure consistency in naming conventions for custom media to maintain accurate tracking.
• Clear Definition: Clearly define each custom medium and its intended use to avoid confusion.
• Regular Review: Regularly review and update your custom media to reflect changes in your marketing strategies.

Using media for analysis

Tracking campaign performance

Description

Tracking the performance of your marketing campaigns is essential to understanding which strategies are effective and which need improvement. Media plays an important role in this analysis by categorizing traffic sources and providing insight into campaign performance.

Implementation

1. UTM Parameters: Use UTM parameters to tag your campaign URLs with appropriate media.
2. Google Analytics Report: Access the Source/Medium report in Google Analytics to view traffic categorized by medium.
3. Performance Metrics: Analyze key performance metrics such as sessions, bounce rates and conversions to evaluate the success of your campaigns.

Good practice

• Campaign Tagging: Ensure all campaign URLs are tagged in accordance with UTM parameters.
• Comparative Analysis: Compare the performance of different media to identify the most effective channels.
• Regular Monitoring: Monitor campaign performance regularly to make data-driven adjustments.

Optimizing Marketing Strategies

Description

Optimizing your marketing strategies based on moderated analytics helps you allocate resources effectively and increase ROI. By understanding which channels drive the most traffic and conversions, you can focus your efforts on high-performing channels.

Implementation

1. Identify Top Media: Use Google Analytics to identify media that drive the most traffic and conversions.
2. Resource Allocation: Allocate more resources to high-performing media and favor low-performing media.
3. Test and Iterate: Continuously test different strategies in each medium and iterate based on performance data.

Good practice

• Data-Driven Decisions: Base your optimization decisions on data and insights from Google Analytics.
• Cross-Channel Synergy: Create synergy between different media to increase overall marketing effectiveness.
• Continuous Improvement: Regularly review and refine your marketing strategies to adapt to changing trends and audience behavior.

Custom reports and segmentation

Description

Creating custom reports and segmenting your data by medium allows you to gain deeper insights into user behavior and campaign performance. This granular analysis helps you make informed decisions and optimize your marketing efforts.

Implementation

1. Custom Reports: Use the custom reports feature in Google Analytics to create reports that focus on specific media and performance metrics.
2. Segmentation: Segment your data by medium to analyze user behavior and conversion paths for different traffic sources.
3. Advanced Segmentation: Create advanced segments to drill down into specific subsets of traffic, such as new vs. Returning visitors.

Good practice

• Customized Reports: Design custom reports that align with your specific business goals and marketing objectives.
• Behavioral Analysis: Use segmentation to analyze how different media influence user behavior and conversion paths.
• Actionable Insights: Extract actionable insights from your reports and use them to inform your marketing strategies.

Setting up custom media

Description

Setting up custom channels in Google Analytics allows you to more accurately track and analyze specific traffic sources and campaigns. Custom media provides flexibility and granularity in your traffic analysis.

Step by Step Guide

1. Define Your Media: Decide on a clear and descriptive name for your custom media.

2. Generate UTM Parameters: Generate UTM parameters for your campaign URL, specifying a custom medium.

• Example: https://www.yoursite.com?utm_medium=webinar&utm_source=email&utm_campaign=product_launch

3. Tag URLs: Add UTM parameters to your campaign URLs and use them in your marketing efforts.

4. Analyze Data: Access the Source/Media report in Google Analytics to view and analyze traffic from your custom media.

Good practice

• Clear Naming Conventions: Use clear and consistent naming conventions for custom media to ensure accurate tracking.
• Regular Updates: Update your custom media as your marketing strategies evolve.
• Detailed Analysis: Use custom reports and segments to analyze traffic performance on custom media.

Conclusion

Understanding and using the media in Google Analytics is critical to effective traffic analysis and optimization of your marketing strategies. By leveraging both default and custom media, you can gain comprehensive insight into how users find and interact with your website, allowing you to make data-driven decisions to enhance your online presence.

Summary of key points

• Media Overview: Media categorizes traffic sources, providing a high-level view of how visitors find your site.
• Default Media: Google Analytics provides several default media, including organic search, direct, referral, paid search, email, social, display, affiliate and others.
• Custom Media: Custom Media allows tailored tracking and analysis of specific traffic sources and campaigns.
• Optimizing Strategies: Use Medium Analytics to track campaign performance, optimize marketing strategies, create custom reports, and segment data for deeper insights.

Final Thoughts

By mastering the use of media in Google Analytics, you can unlock the full potential of your data and run more effective marketing campaigns. Regularly analyze and optimize your traffic sources to ensure you’re getting the most out of your marketing efforts and achieving your business goals.