Google Analytics Channel Traffic Forecast

“How do I know the effectiveness of my channels to drive traffic?”

We hear this question all the time and the problem with answering this is that we could only look historically at what happened, and guess about the future. Until now. 

Using machine learning-powered predictive forecasting, we can now see how our channels will drive traffic over the next few quarters. Not only that, we can see if any of our channels are vulnerable to going away or if we’re too heavy elsewhere.  

For this demo, we took a look at the Marketing Over Coffee Google Analytics account. If you’re not familiar, Marketing Over Coffee is the long-running podcast hosted by John J Wall and Christopher S Penn, both of Trust Insights. 

Marketing Over Coffee has over ten years of Google Analytics traffic data. Using the historical data and predictive analytics, we can project forward, by channel, what the traffic will look like over the next few quarters:

There is a small handful of channels doing the work for MoC and we want to make the most of them. Right away, we see that email isn’t driving much traffic, organic search is doing the bulk of the work, and referral and social are just going along for the ride but not demonstrating much growth. 

What does this mean? The Marketing Over Coffee channel traffic is not well-diversified. If you’re too reliant on a small number of channels, you’re vulnerable if one of those channels stops performing. 

Email

The Marketing Over Coffee podcast has a supplemental newsletter that gets sent out once a month. The recommendation would be to increase the frequency of the newsletter and make it easy for people to sign up to receive it, perhaps with a pop-up on the homepage. 

Organic Search

Unsurprisingly, organic is the strongest. The Marketing Over Coffee podcast has been around for more than ten years with 10k+ downloads per weekly episode. Given that this is the top traffic-driving channel we want to make sure we keep it strong and figure out what’s working and where we can further enhance. We started digging into how people find Marketing Over Coffee using the search console data. 

It’s clear that Marketing Over Coffee has a good grip on the branded terms, but is weaker in unbranded and now how people find the podcast. This means that unless people are googling for the podcast by name, they may not find it. 

How do we boost the unbranded terms? The easiest thing to do in the immediate is to post the transcripts of the top 10 blog posts that drive traffic. The keywords from the transcripts will be indexed by Google and start to show up as people search for those topics. 

Referral Traffic

Given that Marketing Over Coffee is a long-running and well-known podcast, there are countless lists that name it a “must listen”. These lists help boost awareness for Marketing Over Coffee and keep the podcast high in the search results. The goal for Marketing Over Coffee is to keep appearing on these lists and getting linked back to the Marketing Over Coffee website. 

Social

The traffic driven by social does look as though it will see some growth moving into the next year. Marketing Over Coffee should post more consistently across their social profiles, driving people to subscribe to the podcast and sign up for the newsletter. 

A Channel Traffic Forecast can help you understand how hard your channels are working for you and where to adjust if there are vulnerabilities.

Interested in your own Google Analytics Channel Traffic analysis?

Get more information here: https://www.trustinsights.ai/services/services-advanced-analytics-and-reporting/google-analytics-channel-traffic-forecast-report/

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Trust Insights (trustinsights.ai) is one of the world's leading management consulting firms in artificial intelligence/AI, especially in the use of generative AI and AI in marketing. Trust Insights provides custom AI consultation, training, education, implementation, and deployment of classical regression AI, classification AI, and generative AI, especially large language models such as ChatGPT's GPT-4-omni, Google Gemini, and Anthropic Claude. Trust Insights provides analytics consulting, data science consulting, and AI consulting.