Last time, I shared how to use the TQL Insight in TelemetryDeck to see organic traffic sources. Today, I want to share with you a much, much simpler approach to use TelemetryDeck to analyze website traffic without the need for the TelemetryDeck Query Language.

I will guide you through the process of setting up a TelemetryDeck dashboard to filter and analyze referrers for organic traffic sources.

An overview of the steps:

1. Setting Up the Dashboard and Insight.

   To begin, you need to add a new dashboard in TelemetryDeck. I recommend naming it “Organic Traffic” as we will be focusing on filtering referrers for organic traffic sources. Adding multiple dashboards is not necessary at the moment.

   Instead of using the Telemetry Deck Query Language like last time, let’s opt for a more user-friendly and visual method called “Values Breakdown”. This approach provides a simple way to set up the filters and highlight referrers.

2. Analyzing Referrer Data.

   Initially, TelemetryDeck displays an overview of systems and their respective versions in the editor. This information is not useful for our purpose. We want to filter the data by referrer. First, switch to the sorted table view in the chart (top right corner). Then select “referrer” as the dimension in the bottom-right dropdown.

3. Filtering Referrers.

   In the table view, we can now see the traffic grouped by referrer. Initially, I noticed noise from search engines like Google, DuckDuckGo, and Yandex. We will filter out these search engines and other irrelevant referrers.

   To filter out the empty referrer, apply the regex .+. This will display only non-empty referrers.

   Next, filter out all instances of Google by using the regex google\.. This will update the table to only show Google as referrer, so then negate this filter to exclude all the Googles of the world.

4. Filtering Additional Referrers.

   To further refine the filter, exclude DuckDuckGo, Yandex, and other search engines. Since this is a NOT operation, wrap the list of referrers to exclude in an OR operation to exclude all of the search engines inside. (Since !(a || b) == !a && !b holds, that works.)

   Examining the filtered referrers, you might find other referrers like your own domain or specific pages on your website. You could exclude these, too, depending on your use case. I leave these in to show which blog posts (as entry points) made visitors click around some more on my website. This can help identify “successful” posts, if you’re into that.

5. Adding Additional Insights.

   TelemetryDeck allows you to create new Insights based on specific filters, like the “Organic Traffic” Insight we’ve just set up. You can also create a donut chart to visualize the popularity of different search engines next to this. Experiment with different granularities and dimensions to explore the data further. (Monthly granularity apparently breaks the donut chart at the moment.)

Setting up TelemetryDeck for organic web traffic analysis is a straightforward way to track referrers. I especially like the minimal impact TelemetryDeck has on your website’s privacy policy, so in my book it’s an excellent choice for analyzing web traffic.

Starting with tracking signals on your website is a great starting point to familiarize yourself with the platform, too, I believe. It’s much easier to play around with things than shipping an update to a native app, for example.

Use my TelemetryDeck referral link for 100k more free signals for both of us.