Quite obviously, what we had to do was to take a closer look at the traffic sources of our client’s website in the first place. What we found out was hardly surprising: for most large websites there are typically two most important traffic sources, i.e. direct traffic and search. We analysed the referring websites, search traffic, performance campaigns and other important visit sources over the last 12 months and realized that the website traffic decrease was due to the slumping direct traffic and brand search. So we came to the conclusion that the main reason our client was getting less users to the website was a general brand issue.

This is quite easy to explain if we just forget all the technical details of web analytics for the moment and recall the basics of marketing theory and the consumer decision making process. Customers who intend to buy a product will make a decision based on various factors they find important. For most products one of the first factors consumers will take into account is the BRAND. If I know the brand and if I feel this brand is okay for me, I will consider it while making my final purchase decision and most likely go to the brand’s website to check the offer. If I reject a brand because I feel it’s not for me or I think it offers bad quality, I will just exclude it from my alternatives and never go to their website. 

The bad news for digital marketers is that  identifying brand traffic is an easy ride compared to the task of boosting brand traffic This is because the only way to do so is to actually build the brand and make it wanted by customers. And you can do it only by engaging customers via integrated marketing efforts using both offline and online channels.