Traffic Sources
The Traffic Sources metric measures which traffic sources are driving visitors to your website, and provides a comparison of each of those sources. The three main traffic sources are direct, referral and search, although your website may also have traffic from campaigns such as banner ads or paid search. In addition to measuring the number of visitors from each traffic source, consider analyzing the number of goal completions from each source.
Each traffic source can be analyzed to provide more granular information about your web traffic. Search traffic, for instance, can be analyzed according to the landing page and associated keyword rankings; referral traffic can be broken down into categories such as social referrals, blog mentions or service listings. Each source is also an indicator of the health of your website. For instance, a high volume of referral traffic shows that your brand or website is being talked about frequently by third party websites or on social media sites.