Where My Customers Came From in 2010
In previous posts I've shown how much I revenued last year and how much was a result of AdWords spending. Since AdWords only accounted for 23% of revenue we need to figure out where the rest came from.
Organic
Search engine traffic accounts for a big portion of the remaining revenue. I'll break it up into two groups. One for searches from people who were searching for the site by name and one for people searching by keywords.
| Type | Orders | Revenue |
|---|---|---|
| By Name | 185 | $3700 |
| By Keyword | 516 |
$10,320 |
| Total | 701 | $14,020 |
By Search Engine
For fun here's the numbers broken down by search engine.
| Search Engine | Orders | Revenue |
|---|---|---|
| Google |
579 | $11,580 |
| Yahoo | 54 |
$1080 |
| Bing | 42 | $840 |
| Other (AOL, Ask...) |
26 | $520 |
Links
Inbound links were another source of new users last year. There were a total of 108 new orders ($2016 revenue) as a result of a user clicking a link from another site. I generally don't do a lot of link building, but was fortunate enough to be mentioned in two articles on high traffic sites in 2010.
Direct
This means a user opened their browser and typed the domain directly into the address bar. How they actually learned about the site is impossible to tell. I generally chalk it up to word of mouth. Logically this group is pretty much the same as people who typed the site name into Google.
In 2010 there were 285 users who came to the site directly and eventually subscribed, generating revenue of $5700.
Summing It Up
Here's what the complete picture looks like for new individual orders in 2010. This doesn't include group orders or renewals.
| Type | Orders | % of Orders |
|---|---|---|
| AdWords | 331 | 23% |
| Organic By Name |
185 |
13% |
| Organic By Keyword |
516 | 36% |
| Link | 108 | 8% |
| Direct | 285 | 20% |
3 Comments
The problem with GA is that since there is a free trial period it's harder to track people who convert to paying customers days or weeks later.
Instead I use the GA cookie to pull the referrer data and store that in the DB when the user creates their account.
To get these numbers I would just run some queries to filter what I was looking for.
I hope you will continue this series by putting other aspects of your business under the microscope - it's very inspiring!