What is Performance by Traffic Source?
Performance by Traffic Source helps you understand performance metrics for each channel that brings visitors to your site. This report makes it easy for creators to view and understand the channels where it’s most effective to promote their content to boost their traffic and earnings.
The report pulls in data from your Google Analytics account and groups individual referrers into eight key sources. Here’s a breakdown of what’s included in each of these sources:
- Google Search: All Google referrer values, including non-US versions and alternate values like www.google.com vs search.google.com.
- Email: All Email referrer values, including traffic from your own email campaigns and other email sources.
- Pinterest: All Pinterest referrer values, including non-US versions.
- Facebook: All Facebook referrer values, including www.facebook.com, m.facebook.com, l.facebook.com, lm.facebook.com, etc.
- Instagram: All Instagram referrer values, including www.instagram.com, m.instagram.com, l.instagram.com, lm.instagram.com, etc.
- Twitter: All Twitter referrer values, including non-US versions.
- Direct: Traffic that comes in without a referrer value.
- Other: Traffic that does not fall into one of the above groups.
Performance by Traffic Source surfaces the following metrics for each page of your site:
- Pageviews: Raptive relies on Google Analytics to report pageviews for each site in our network. Google Analytics measures a pageview whenever someone loads a page on a website or their browser history state is changed by the active site.
- Page RPM: Revenue per 1,000 pageviews. Total ad earnings divided by pageviews for the same time period multiplied by 1,000.
- Earnings: The amount of money you earned.
- Impressions per Pageview: The amount of ad impressions that were served, on average, for each pageview to a specific URL (ads in view refresh every 30 seconds)
- CPM: “Cost per mille” or “cost per 1,000" refers to the revenue you make for every 1,000 ad impressions that were filled.
- Viewability: A measurement of how well ads on the page are seen by readers (higher viewability can lead to higher earnings)
Powered by Google Ad Manager 360, Performance by Traffic Source blends revenue data with Google Analytics pageviews for each URL in the report. Access complete and reliable lifetime earnings as far back as the data is available!
You can click the arrows in the column headers to sort by another metric or to reverse-sort. When you do this, an updated set of pages will populate in the table. So, if you choose to sort by the highest Page RPM, your 100 pages with the highest Page RPM from the selected traffic source will display. Reverse-sort to see your 100 pages with the lowest Page RPM from that source.
Notes:
- Performance by Traffic Source data is available from August 7, 2021 onward.
- On May 15, 2024, we corrected an issue where some null traffic sources were being rolled up into “Other” instead of “Direct” and applied this change retroactively in the dashboard.
- On July 16, 2024, we rolled up additional traffic sources into their parent categories and applied these changes retroactively in the dashboard to make your data as accurate as possible.
- On August 27, 2024, we added “Email” as a separate traffic source. Previously, email traffic was included in the “Direct” and “Other” sources. Email reporting before this date may be incomplete.
FAQs
Q: How does traffic get assigned to “Email”?
A: We look for UTM parameters that, when included as part of a linked URL, identify traffic as having come from email. UTM is a tracking method used to analyze the effectiveness of marketing campaigns by attaching specific tracking information to URLs. UTM parameters are the individual tags added to URLs.
When one of your site visitors clicks on a link with UTM parameters, the data is sent to analytics tools (such as Google Analytics), which helps you identify the traffic source for that site visit.
Some common URL identifiers for email include:
- utm_medium=email (Note: this also captures identifiers before and after “email”, such as “WY_email” or “email_button”)
- utm_medium=rss
- utm_medium=newsletter
- utm_medium=campaign
- utm_medium=flodesk
- utm_medium=feedblitz (Note: this also captures identifiers before and after, such as “feedblitzemail” or “feedblitzrss”)
Q: Why don’t I have any email traffic and/or revenue?
A: Check the URLs in your email newsletters to ensure they include utm_medium parameters that identify email traffic. Most email service providers apply these parameters automatically. Contact our team if you need help identifying or adding UTM parameters.
Q: Why is my email RPM super high and/or why is my email traffic so low when I’m seeing revenue from it?
A: If you’re using Monster Insights, it could be because of the “Privacy Guard”. You could test disabling the Privacy Guard in Monter Insights which should allow Google Analytics to track properly.