Diversify your traffic channels

Having a healthy distribution of traffic across different channels will boost your resilience. We’ve heard many stories of plummeting traffic following the algorithm changes of top referrers. Let’s review ways to diversify your traffic channels.

Social

Clicking on the blue “social” box will show you how your content is resonating across the Web’s biggest social platforms. Maybe you’re doing great on Facebook, but your Twitter referrals are stagnant; in that case, you should reconsider how you’re packaging your tweets and see if that yields improvements over time. Not getting any traffic from Pinterest or LinkedIn? Invest some time promoting stories on those platforms and, using the “new” and “returning” visitor filters, see whether you’re reaching a new audience.

Search

Unsure of whether your SEO strategy is working? Click on the yellow “search” box and track the referral data over time to see whether it’s yielding improvements.

Internal

Internal referrals are a magnifying glass into which stories keep readers on your site longer. Is this specific to particular posts or topics that can be curated for a richer experience? Driving social reach is not exclusive to social media managers. Find out more on how homepage editors can seed content for success on offsite in our authority report: The Rebirth of the Homepage.

Direct

Lastly, if you’re getting a significant portion of direct traffic, then consider using campaign tracking. This will help you understand other mediums that have no referrer information.

More tactics

Recategorizing requests

If an emerging Social or Search referrer emerges in the “Other” classification, you may request that we recategorize. To do so, contact Support. Keep in mind that our designations affect all customers and everyone may not agree with how to categorize some referrers.

Referrer groups

You may always create a referrer group to customize the referrer experience to your liking. Read more here.

Additional Resources

If you need additional help to diversify your traffic channels, contact your Relationship Manager. You may also find help in one of these other resources:

• Posting to Apple News or Google AMP? We can display that in Parse.ly.
• If you have content in mobile apps, we can track that too.
• Using Campaign metrics