One of the questions I kept coming back to throughout 2023 was this: who are these new people finding us, and how are they getting here through Google Analytics traffic sources?
It sounds simple. But when you are in the middle of running campaigns, posting content, optimising pages, and basically doing ten things at once, it is easy to assume you know the answer without actually looking. So I pulled the Google Analytics traffic sources data across two separate six month windows and what came back was genuinely surprising in places.
Here is what I found.
January to June 2023
Paid Search was carrying the most weight when it came to bringing in new users. That made sense as we had active campaigns running and they were doing their job. Organic Search was second, which was encouraging, and Direct traffic sat just behind that, meaning people were either bookmarking the site or typing the URL in directly. That is usually a sign that some brand recognition is starting to stick.
Organic Social was in there too, which told me the content we were putting out on social platforms was actually pulling people through to the site and not just getting likes and scrolling past. Referral traffic, Paid Other, and Organic Video rounded out the picture.
A healthy spread honestly. Nothing alarming, nothing to celebrate too loudly. Paid was doing the heavy lifting and organic was building quietly in the background.
July to December 2023
This is where things got interesting.
Organic Search jumped to the top. Not because paid dropped off dramatically but because organic genuinely caught up and overtook it. That shift does not happen overnight. It is the result of months of consistent content, better page structure, and keywords that were finally indexing properly. It is slow work and easy to lose faith in. But there it was.
Organic Social stayed strong, which told me the social content was still converting. People were seeing posts and actually clicking through rather than just scrolling. Cross-Network appeared as a new source in the mix, showing traffic coming from a wider range of platforms. Direct traffic held steady.
The thing that stood out most was Paid Search sliding down the list. Not disappearing but no longer the dominant force it had been. In some ways that is a win. It means the organic foundation was doing enough that we were not as dependent on ad spend to keep new users coming in.
Paid Shopping showed up in the second half too as a new addition and it brought in some traffic though organic shopping performed better. That is a pattern worth watching.
What this actually means
The honest takeaway is that the channel mix shifted significantly across the year and mostly in a good direction. We went from being heavily reliant on paid to having a much more balanced picture where organic, both search and social, was doing real work.
That is what sustainable growth looks like. Paid can spike your numbers quickly but the moment you turn off the spend the traffic goes with it. Organic builds slower but it sticks around. Seeing that shift happen in real time in our own data made the months of content work feel worth it.
If you are looking at your own acquisition data and wondering where to focus, it helps to step back for a moment and ask a slightly different question. Which channels are actually growing on their own, without you constantly pushing budget into them or propping them up with short term campaigns? It is easy to get distracted by the channels you are actively managing because they feel productive in the moment, but the quieter ones often tell a more honest story. When you look closely at your google analytics traffic sources, you will usually spot a few areas that are steadily picking up traction in the background. That is often where your real momentum is hiding, and it is worth paying attention to because it tends to be more sustainable and far less dependent on ongoing spend..
More from this data series coming soon.