Google Analytics Terminology-Part 3

There are three major ways visitors reach your website. Direct traffic, search engines and link referrals. Knowing where visitors come from helps us identify areas of opportunity. At the same time we can also determine weak areas where we should exert more effort on.

In this blog series we’re going to cover the basics of the Traffic Sources section in the Google Analytics Dashboard.
Direct Traffic
This visitor traffic source refers to visitors coming to your website through bookmarks, directly typing your website URL or other means that appears we are typing the address of a website into a web browser. Direct traffic is also mostly attributed to links coming from email marketing campaigns.
Referring Sites
This visitor traffic source refers to external sites your visitors previously visited before reaching your website. It can be a directory that lists down your website or a link from a blog that used one of your pages as reference. There are two benefits of obtaining links. First, it delivers traffic and second, it enforces the importance of our page to rank well in search engines.
Search Engines
This visitor traffic source refers to visitors who previously visited a search engine (Google, Yahoo, Bing or others), searched a term, found your page on search results and clicked the link to your site. Because these search engines are recognized by Google Analytics, they are automatically categorized under “Search Engines”. Others that aren’t categorized yet will simply fall under “Referring Sites but can easily be added to “Search Engines” if needed.

Keywords
How does traffic from search keywords compare to traffic as a whole to your site? The graph shows overall trends while the table shows the keywords driving trends. AdWords Campaign
How do people referred from your AdWords Campaign compare to the “average” visitor to your site? Click an AdWords Campaign in the table to see its component ad groups and keywords. The “Clicks” tab displays the AdWords cost, impression, and ROI data useful for monitoring the profitability of your AdWords Campaigns and keywords.
Keyword Position
Where do your AdWords ads appear on Google search results pages and how much influence does search position have on volume(visits) and visit quality (avg. pageviews, converstion rates, per visit value)? Use this report to determin your optimal search position for each keyword and plan your bidding accordingly. Drill down from any keyword to see its display position.
Campaigns
How do the people referred from your configured campaigns compare to the “average” visitor to your site? The graph shows overall trends while the table lists each of your configured campaigns. Since all traffic in this report results from campaigns that you explicitly control, you can use this information to add or delete campaigns, or to determine the effectiveness of tests that you have set up using custom tags.
Ad Versions
How do your AdWords ads compare against each other? This report shows you which ad copy is most effective. Ads with high clickthrough rates show that the copy is effective at getting the user to click, while high bounce rates, for example, indicate a need for landing pages that are consistent with what the ad promises.