First, Find Out Where Your Visitors Are Coming From. Then Do Anything Else.
Before redesigning buttons or chasing AI tools, check Google Analytics. Five minutes of data beats weeks of random tweaks. Here's where to look first.
Hey marketer! 👋🏻
I’ve noticed something a lot of self-taught marketers do when they’re working on their websites. They go based on whatever they happen to come across. They read an article about design trends and immediately start redesigning. Then they spot a tip about some must-have feature and implement it right away. Then they start tweaking their copy with an AI tool for better SEO. And then something else.
Each individual change makes sense on its own. But put together, it’s just a series of random experiments with no direction. First, you should know whether people are even coming to your website (so you can improve it to convert better and guide them), or whether you need to improve it for better discoverability (so more people find it in the first place).
And the answers to these basic questions are available for free and just a few clicks away. How many people visit your site? Where do they come from - social media, search engines, somewhere else? And what do they do once they arrive? Once you know this, you immediately see what to work on. Getting lots of visitors from social media? Great, that’s working. Hardly anyone from search engines? Then it’s obvious where to focus your energy - not on tweaking button colors, but on better content.
Neglected fundamentals come back to bite you
I’m watching online marketing split more and more into two camps. On one side, people who go strictly by the data and make decisions based on it. On the other, people who go on intuition, try new tools, test AI, and hope it somehow works out.
And yet - now more than ever - it’s time to stop doing things by feel and start doing them based on data. Not so you can call yourself a “data-driven marketer” or anything else that sounds good on LinkedIn. But because your energy (the time or money you’re investing in your website) should go where it actually makes sense.
You can afford to work without data in only three cases:
Your website isn’t your main source of customers or income
You have such a specific niche that you have practically no competition and you’re easy to find
You’re just starting out and don’t have any data yet (in which case it makes sense to at least follow current trends and recommendations until you collect your own)
In all other cases, the minimum baseline step is this: find out where your people are coming from and what they’re doing on your website.
Here’s how to find out in five minutes with Google Analytics
You don’t need to be an analyst. You don’t need to understand statistics. You just need to know where to look.
If you have Google Analytics 4 (and most websites already have GA4), the process is straightforward.
Where to find the traffic source overview:
Go to Business Objectives → Generate Leads → Traffic Acquisition. Here you’ll see where people are coming to your website from. The basic channels you’ll find there:
Organic Search - people found you through Google’s organic results
Direct - they typed your address directly into the browser (or have you bookmarked)
Referral - they came from another website linking to you
Organic Social - they came from posts on social media
Paid Search / Paid Social - they came from paid ads
Email - they came via a link in an email
Where to focus first:
Look at the last 30 days. You’ll find out which channels are actually bringing people in and which are essentially dead.
Bonus - Search Console for SEO:
If you have Google Search Console connected (and if you don’t, connect it - it’s free and you can handle it yourself), you’ll also find out which keywords people are using to find you on Google. That’s the foundation for any SEO work.
One thing that skews your data a little - and you need to account for it
Before you dive into the numbers, one important warning. The data in Analytics is never 100% accurate. And one of the main reasons today is cookie banners.
You definitely know what I’m talking about - those pop-ups with “Accept All” or “Reject” buttons that appear on every website. They’re required by law, but they have an unpleasant side effect: a portion of visitors reject cookies, and their visit either isn’t counted in Analytics at all, or is recorded without source details. These people then disappear from your data, or hide under the mysterious “Direct” channel - even though they actually came from somewhere else entirely.
How many people reject cookies? It depends on the industry and how your cookie banner is set up. It can easily be in the double digits. So when you see numbers in Analytics, count on the fact that real traffic is higher - but you don’t know the exact channel ratio.
What does this mean? Take the data as an indicator of trends, not absolute truth. You care about trends and ratios, not exact numbers down to the last visit.
What to do once you finally see the data
Okay. You opened Analytics, looked at the traffic sources, and you see the numbers. What next?
There are two ways to look at this - and both are equally important.
First: confirming what works
This is the most overlooked part. You find a channel that brings in significantly more people than the others - and that’s information worth reflecting on. Most people coming from organic search? Then SEO is working for you and it makes sense to keep going and grow it. Lots of people coming from Referral - from other websites? Then it’s worth finding out which ones specifically, and thinking about how to get more similar links. Email working well? Great, that’s a channel you have full control over and it’s worth developing.
The data here isn’t telling you what to do. It’s telling you what you’re already doing - and where it makes sense to double down.
Second: spotting opportunities for improvement
And now the more interesting part. The channels where the numbers surprise you - but in the worse sense of the word.
A few real-world examples:
If you see that 80% or more of visits come as Direct, that’s a warning sign. Some of that is genuine direct visitors, but a large part are the ones the cookie banner “stole” from other channels. That means you know much less about your traffic sources than it appears.
If you have decent organic traffic from Google, but people stay on the website for an average of 20 seconds, then SEO is working - but the page they’re landing on probably doesn’t match what they were looking for. The problem isn’t bringing people in, it’s what they find.
If you invest time into social media, but Organic Social brings in minimal visitors, that’s a question to think about - either you’re being followed by people who already know you and don’t need a direct link, or the content on social isn’t fulfilling the function you expect from it.
And if you have no Referral traffic at all - no websites linking to you - that’s a clear call to start building backlinks, mentions, and collaborations.
Data doesn’t have to be complicated to be useful
You don’t need to track 47 metrics. You just need to know three things:
Where people come from - which channels are working
What they do on your website - how long they stay, which pages they visit
What they do in the end - do they fill out a form, call, buy?
When you know this, you know where it makes sense to put in the work. When you don’t know this, you’re optimizing blindly.
And that’s exactly the mistake a lot of people make. They chase new AI tools, test more plugins, change the design - but forget to look at what’s actually happening on their website.
So before you start with anything else, go check your Google Analytics if you haven’t done so recently.
See you in the next one 👋🏻
Jan Barborik
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