Google Analytics Source / Medium Report & User / Metro as Secondary Dimension

I had a client call yesterday which prompted the need to write this article.   The business is in the early stage of building an online presence.  While business has been strong through word-of-mouth, their goal is to reach new regions and demographics via SEO / PPC and/or Social Media.

Google Analytics was installed in March of 2022, so there is not yet a full year’s worth of data with which to compare Year over Year/ Month to Month traffic trends, so the question became “How do we know if we are making progress?”  My standard answer for this is, “Well, without Year over Year trends to account for seasonality, the only thing we can focus on, is gradual, incremental month to month improvement.   

High level traffic has been steady for the last few months with a few peaks and valleys, but nothing significant to speak of.  This is mostly branded keyword traffic, friends and family with a few non-branded outliers.   The previous agency had been sending over a monthly report with traffic totals, although its not clear where these numbers were coming from and lacked any deeper analysis.

Which brings me to the Geographic reports in Google Analytics.   For my own sites, and client sites, the Source / Medium report is the first report I look at, followed by the GEO report under Audience, or I choose User/Metro as the secondary dimension in the Source Medium report.  

There are countless other reports in GA which provide valuable information on other aspects of the site, however, this report is my Go-To, first report to understand the lay of the land for a new client, or to see what happened on the previous day/week for current clients.  

Under the User reports, you can also choose “City,” however this is confusing when you get traffic Columbus, Columbia, Athens, Paris or any other city name that exists in multiple states, as it’s not clear which state GA is referring to.  There is also a “Metro ID” option which is just a series of numbers and meaningless to most.  The “Metro” option is more descriptive as it will read as “Dallas - Ft Worth TX” or “Washington DC (Hagerstown, MD)”.  

Back to yesterday’s client conversation.   Once we drilled down into this report, we were able to see that most of the client’s traffic was coming from another state, that this business does not service.  In fact, Michigan is about 2,000 miles from the region where this client does business.  

With a few search on Google for the companies name and “Michigan” we were able to determine that there was a similar business with a similar name in Michigan and they were ranking pos 3 or 4 under the Michigan company in position 1, and so most of their Google organic traffic was coming from customers in Michigan looking for the Michigan company. 

Unbeknownst to my client and it’s CEO, these monthly traffic reports they had been receiving were a bit misleading as the traffic volume and fluctuation was driven largely by entirely irrelevant traffic and visitors who would never and could never become clients.   

While marketers are consumed with traffic volumes and fluctuations, the complexion, or make up of the traffic is often more telling than the traffic totals and can in fact, be misleading.  

The GEO reports are also beneficial for understanding traffic quality.  If I log in and see 100 visitors in 2 hours from Russia, I know that’s not real traffic and a bot snuck in around some filters.  If I see 2 visitors from Indiana, 3 from Arizona, 2 from Florida, 3 from New York, 4 from California and 2 from Texas,  I know that’s normal traffic.  It smells like normal traffic.  Businesses that operate nationally typically traffic by state proportionate to the state’s population.   More often than not, reports by state will lead with the business’s home state having the most traffic, followed by California, Texas, New York, Florida, Pennsylvania, Illinois and so forth.   When I see traffic patterns deviate from this, for example, disproportionate traffic from Massachussettes, I know something out of the ordinary happened in this time period.  Either someone mentioned the site in a blog, there was a news article in a town, or there was simply a flurry of word of mouth from a good, or even bad, customer experience.