Skip to main content
Understanding the Traffic Sources

Use this resource to help you understand where your consultation traffic is coming from.

Vishwas Prasad avatar
Written by Vishwas Prasad
Updated over a month ago

The EngagementHQ Project Summary Report presents Traffic Sources to help you understand how users arrive at your projects and their level of engagement. This data will help show you:

  • How people are finding your site

  • The performance of your promotion campaigns

  • Where you can improve communications

For example, if most of your traffic arrives via email instead of your extensive social media campaign, you should reevaluate your messaging. This data can help plan future promotions or if you need to improve SEO.

View the Traffic Sources Data

To generate the report:

  1. Go to Reporting > Project Reports in your admin.

  2. Select the projects and date range you want to analyze. Please note that All Time is from the day your site launched until 11:59 p.m. yesterday. To include data from today, please select a Custom date range.

  3. Find the relevant data under Sources of Traffic. You can toggle different channels on and off the graph and use the export icon to download the graph in various formats.

  4. You can also see the Traffic Sources Overview when you download the Summary Report pdf.

Reading the Report

The report includes a graph showing the amount of traffic from each channel. You can switch between Daily and Monthly views and include or exclude specific channels by selecting them in the legend.

Sources of traffic graphic in project report

Alongside the graph is a chart presenting the Aware, Informed, and Engaged numbers and percentages for each Traffic Channel; there is only a number for Aware visitors as it equates to 100% of visits. In this example, the Direct channel has 221 visits (100%), and of those, 138 (62.4%) were also Informed visitors, and 89 (40.3%) were also Engaged.

To find the percentage of visitors that were only Engaged or Informed, please check out Calculate the percentages of your Aware, Informed, and Engaged visitors.

What are the Traffic Channels?

EngagementHQ has developed an independent analytics engine to help classify links leading to your site. You can see the traffic your consultation has received from the following:

  • Direct: People who have arrived at your site by entering the URL directly into their browser. Direct traffic may also be due to:

    • Links from emails sent from outside EngagementHQ

    • Traffic sources that were untraceable for whatever reason, such as apps that don’t allow referrer tracking, are logged as Direct

    • Users who have bookmarked or saved the URL in their browser history

  • Email: Traffic arriving at your site via links in EngagementHQ Newsletter campaigns or external email tools that include a tracking link.

  • .Gov Sites: Traffic arriving via links from sites with .gov or .govt in the domain.

  • Search Engine: Traffic generated from search engines such as Google or Bing.

  • Social: Traffic linked from social media such as Facebook, X, LinkedIn, Google+, or Instagram.

  • Referrals: Traffic linked from non-government websites, such as community groups or business websites.

    • Note: Traffic linked from QR codes would most likely be logged as a referral, but there’s no way to directly measure the percentage. Google Analytics would be best to measure traffic from QR codes.

Track External Emails

While the Email channel only tracks backlinks in emails originating from EngagementHQ, you can still track emails sent from third-party tools such as Mail Chimp. To do so, you’ll need to add the following code to the end of the link in the email:

utm_medium=email&utm_source=custom_text 

You'll need to replace the custom text with the traffic source you want to identify in the reports. For example, the complete URL would look like this:

https:// demonstration.engagementhq.com/ideas?utm_medium=email&utm_source=email_campaign

You can also track QR codes with this option, but you’ll find more accurate data in Google Analytics when tracking QR codes.

Did this answer your question?