Digital marketers spend a lot of time focused on PPC and SEO campaigns in order to drive desirable traffic to a website. The phrases we’re ranking for and bidding on get meticulous attention, so much so that we often forget about some of the other ways that visitors find us.

We put a tremendous amount of the effort we put into reviewing organic search data and PPC campaign performance in analytics. But how closely do we monitor referral reports?

If that’s not a channel you review regularly, you may be missing out on seeing traffic that is coming directly from links you’ve obtained around the web, local business listings, news mentions, and more. Many times, links are only considered as a means to an end, a metric that Google uses in determining how to rank sites in the SERPs (search engine results pages). But the fact is, many of a site’s links may be directly contributing to its traffic.

In this article, we’ll review how to look at referral reports in Google Analytics, and some of the many ways to use that data to better inform your web marketing decisions.

When the client first came to you, you talked up the value of Google Analytics. You emphasized the importance of seeing where your traffic was coming from. You went on and on about how Google Analytics can show traffic sources to pinpoint whether people came from search, social media or a specific site referral, and how valuable this data was. You sold them on it, so much so that your client looked forward to receiving that first report, the magical day when they would finally understand where visitors were coming from.

But then the report came, and it looked like this:

 

 

It showed that 10% of your client’s traffic came from “(direct)/(none)”. What does this label mean? How do you explain Direct traffic to your client? Better yet, how do you explain “none”?

Let’s take a closer look at understanding Direct traffic in Google Analytics and how we can address it with clients.

There are a lot of reasons why you might want to share access to your company's Instagram account with your digital marketing agency.

1. You want your agency to run ads for your business on Instagram.
2. You'd like your agency to boost some of your Instagram posts to achieve specific marketing objectives.
3. You want your agency to create content and post directly to your feed.

Instagram advertising is handled through Facebook Ads. So, you can achieve the first two objectives by sharing access through Facebook Business Manager. In the third case, you will need to share your company's Instagram account password with your agency or else give them access through a third-party tool like Hootsuite or Buffer.

We've put together this blog post to walk through the steps in each scenario and provided screen shots to make it easy to follow. So, if you are ready to begin sharing Instagram access with your agency, but haven't known how to get started, you've found the right resource.