How to Use Google Analytics Segments to Find Traffic Sources to a Page

Want to know how to get traffic stats for a specific page in Google Analytics using segments? If you aren’t checking the sources of your website’s traffic, you’re missing out on opportunities to drive more traffic to your site and keep visitors engaged.

In this article, we’ll show you how to use Google Analytics segments to find traffic sources for specific pages on your website.

Google Analytics Traffic Sources

Your site’s traffic comes from many sources. Let’s take a look at each so you’ll know what the stats mean when you look in Google Analytics for the traffic sources of specific pages.

Organic Traffic

This is traffic that comes from search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

High organic traffic usually means your SEO efforts are paying off and your keywords are strong. It also means you’re getting new readers to your website regularly, people trust your website enough to visit it, and your success is on the rise.

Referral Traffic

Traffic that comes from any other source besides a search engine, such as a link on another website that leads to your website, is referral traffic.

If you have a lot of referral traffic coming to your website, you’re an established website in your industry that others trust enough to cite on their own website for their own target audience to click on and view.

Referral traffic can help you build a strong influence in your niche, monetize your site with advertisements other businesses trust to place on your website, and even boost conversions rates as people visiting sites similar to yours begin to frequent your site and see what you have to offer.

Not to mention, outbound links to your website help your search rankings.

Social Traffic

This kind of traffic comes from social media networks such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram.

Having a strong presence on social media is important for interacting with loyal followers, reaching a wider audience, and sharing different types of content with your target audience.

Paid Search

If you use Google AdWords and someone clicks on your ad from a search engine result, this counts as a paid search traffic source.

Monitoring your AdWords campaigns in Google Analytics is essential to making sure your investment in content marketing is paying off.

Email Traffic

Anyone that clicks on a link that leads to your website from an email marketing campaign, such as a newsletter, is considered email traffic. Knowing whether your site visitors are coming from your email campaigns is great for finding out whether you encourage site visitors to come back to your site or not.

Direct Traffic

Direct traffic is usually reserved for site visitors that access your website in one of two ways:

• Typing your website’s URL directly into their web browser
• Clicking on a saved bookmarking that leads right to your website

However, direct traffic is also for times when Google Analytics cannot tell where your site visitor came from before visiting your website.

Now, let’s take a look at 2 ways to use Google Analytics, 1 quick and easy way, and 1 more advanced using segments, to find traffic sources to a specific page on your website.

Use Google Analytics to View Traffic Sources

It’s very easy to see the traffic sources of a specific page in your Google Analytics account.

To start, log into your Google Analytics account and navigate to Behavior » Site Content. From there you can choose whether to view the traffic sources of all of your website’s pages, the landing pages, or the exit pages.

In this example we’ll show you how to view the traffic sources of your site’s landing pages, which is important because these are the pages many visitors will land on first when visiting your site.

Next, navigate to Secondary Dimension » Acquisition » Source/Medium.

Now you’ll see a list of your website’s landing pages, complete with the source of your site’s traffic, which is where visitors were before clicking on your website, and the medium, which is how your visitors arrived at your website.

Now we’ll take a look at how to use segments to take a closer look at traffic stats for a specific page in Google Analytics.

Create a Segment in Google Analytics to View Traffic Sources

You can track traffic stats of a specific web page using the segments feature in Google Analytics. While this method is more advanced than the one above, it will give you a more detailed look at the traffic sources of specific pages on your website.

In fact, your Google Analytics Behavior report only provides you a collective view of all your traffic sources, breaking it down into direct, organic, and referral traffic.

This is helpful, but Google Analytics segments can break your traffic sources down even further. For example, you’ll also see when your site’s traffic comes from paid traffic sources or social media sources.

Not to mention, after you create a segment you can apply it to all other reports you access in Google Analytics so you can always see where all of your site visitor traffic comes from.

Step 1: Create a Segment

To get started, log into your Google Analytics account.

Then, navigate to Acquisition » Overview.

Near the top of the overview screen, click on + Add Segment.

Click on the red + New Segment button.

Step 2: Configure Your Segment

Now you’ll need to configure your segment so Google Analytics knows what data to collect.

Start by giving your segment a name. We’ll name ours Traffic Sources.

Then click on Conditions.

Click on the Ad Content dropdown menu under Filter and search for Page Title.

Next, enter the URL of the specific page you want to track. Only enter the part of the domain name that is linked to the page you are wanting to track.

For example, if you want to find the sources of traffic for your web page https://www.mywebsite.com/how-to-find-traffic-sources/, only enter /how-to-find-traffic-sources/ into the contains box.

Click Save.

Now, navigate to Acquisition » Overview and click on your newly created segment. Remember, we named ours Traffic Sources.

Search for your segment in the Search Segment search bar.

Click Apply.

Step 3: View Your Segment

Now, anytime you navigate to any Google Analytics report, including Acquisition » Overview, you’ll see your newly created segment.

If you want to include your entire website’s activity and traffic sources, click on + Add Segment, and select All Users from the pre-set list of segment names.

Click Apply.

You’ll now see both segments. One for the specific web page you’re tracking and the one for all of your website’s web pages.

They will be 2 different colors. In our example, the web page we are tracking is in blue. The rest of the website data is in orange. This way you can easily tell the difference between the 2 segments and compare things such as traffic sources.

And there you have it! You now know how to use Google Analytics segments to find traffic sources of specific web pages.

If you want to increase traffic to your website, check our article detailing hacks that will bring more organic traffic to your website than ever before.

If you are looking for a quick way to view other data related to your site traffic, such as device, gender, and top referral sources, and don’t want to dive into creating Google Analytics segments, check out MonsterInsights, the plugin designed to make Google Analytics easy.

And, please, don’t forget to follow us on Facebook and Twitter.