There is a number of way how people get to your website, and also, that means there is a lot options where to spend time and money to advertise your website.

If you check your website statistics, you will be able to see where most visitors are coming from to your pages. This is most generic statistics and it’s always good to know which efforts bring most visitors.

With advanced tools like Google Analytics you can set specific goals to monitor which sources of visitors contribute most to those goals. Example of the goals to track may be: new user registration, sales inquiry form submission, receiving payment. So far so good, but I’d like to take it one step further.

What I really want to know as a website owner, which sources of traffic bring me most value. So, another important report should be based on amount you earn from clients in extended time frame which may be 3, 5, 10 years. That means, that once new account is established, it should be tagged with the source of that lead, then later, report will be generated on average earnings based on the source.

Using this report you will be able to tell exactly which sources of visitors bring more and better sales long term and you can also optimize your budget and efforts to get better quality leads.

Technical solution is extremely simple, when visitor comes to your site, store URL of the referring page in the cookies. When visitor places an order or submits contact form, that URL should be stored in the system for later analysis or included in the contact request to be processed manually. Once information is stored, it’s quite simple to create a report showing you value of the website traffic sources.