Evaluating the Value of Referral Traffic

EVERYONE wants more traffic to their site. I take a periodic look at where my traffic is coming from to optimize what's working and to either improve upon or eliminate what isn't.

My recent look at my Google Analytics for the Hot Dog Truck revealed the following top 6 traffic sources:

I am getting 27% of my traffic from Google Search. I have my site loaded with the keywords I want to be searched for, I have meta tags installed and I have a healthy amount of links to my site. Search engines like my site!

I am getting another 27% of my traffic from Yahoo. Ditto what I said about Google.

Nearly 11% of my traffic comes DIRECT. This is folks who have bookmarked my site or type the URL into the browser directly. Much of this traffic comes from local sources who want to know about the Hot Dog Truck-when it's open etc.

This next one surprised me. Blog Catalog sends me 5% of my total traffic! That is powerful stuff. If I were a new blogger, I would definitely sign up for Blog Catalog!

Blogger.com, where my site is hosted, sends along 4% of my traffic. This is from the "next blog" button and internal Blogger searches.

Stumble Upon sends 3.5% of my total traffic. I have been trying to get more referrals from Stumble Upon over the past few months. Darren Rowse, the ProBlogger, has a good article on making your site Stumble Upon Friendly. I was getting ZERO referrals from Stumble Upon two months ago, so I was very pleased to see the recent numbers!

The rest of my traffic comes from other referral sources too numerous to list here. These are the top referring sources that any newbie should try to use. I would like to see the Stumble Upon numbers go up and I'm working on it! I'll keep ya posted.