Understanding Your Exit Traffic

Just looked at the website analytics for the Media Association of Pittsburgh again. The Sterling Advertising website is, once again, the biggest referring site of traffic to this media peer group website. It's the third largest referrer over all (behind Google organic and direct hits), and beats Bing as a referrer.

The reason that this is interesting is in what it shows about the media industry and why visitors come to the Sterling Advertising website. People are looking for jobs, not ad agencies, when they search for my keywords. One of the best things I did to help understand the intent of visitors to my site was to put an 'Employment' link on the top navigation. Almost every visitor that came to my site after searching 'Pittsburgh Advertising Agencies' goes to that link. Until that point, I thought that these were visitors looking for a new advertising agency and that I wasn't converting them into customers. It was keeping me awake at night! However, knowing that these are searchers looking for local jobs has made me feel better, and dig deeper for keywords with a greater sense of intent for my intended goal (to hire a brilliant ad agency).

Where this exit traffic goes to is another sign to help me understand what the intent of these visitors was. Most people don't have the ability to see the hits to the sites that visitors leave their site to go to (we created the MAP website and ran it for the last three years), but there is a simple way to make this information visible in Google Analytics. (Click here to see how). Where your visitors exit to is another great way to understand why they came to visit in the first place.