From organic to social and paid to referral, what’s the best way for businesses to understand the different types of traffic coming to their website? When business owners or executives ask for web analytics data, they’re usually asking where traffic, leads, and sales come from. This translates to understanding not only how users are getting to the website, but what channels are successful at making money. Sage Digi will discuss how healthy balances of website traffic have the power to influence media spend, organic optimization efforts, and more.
Understand Current Website Traffic
If you’re feeling overwhelmed by the infinite options for driving traffic to your website, you’re not alone. Truth be told, there’s a lot to learn from the amount and type of website traffic you’re receiving. While it’s easy to get tied up in numbers, the most important part of understanding website data is analyzing your overall digital marketing efforts. If you’re feeling overwhelmed by the infinite options for driving traffic to your website, you’re not alone. Truth be told, there’s a lot to learn from the amount and type of website traffic you’re receiving. While it’s easy to get tied up in numbers, the most important part of understanding website data is analyzing your overall digital marketing efforts.
• Do you have a social media strategy in place, post content consistently, and engage with followers?
• Are you using online advertising strategies to showcase products or services?
• Have you recently optimized blog articles or web pages for SEO?
If you answered yes to any of the above points, you’re already making efforts to solidify the amount of website traffic you’re getting – congrats! If you answered no, don’t worry – that’s why Sage Digi is here to help.
Types of Website Traffic
Let’s take a look at the different types of website traffic and how to determine which channel your marketing efforts should focus on based on goals.
Organic Traffic
Organic traffic is perhaps one source that digital marketers look at the most (and often see as their pride and joy from an SEO point of view). Organic traffic is supported by visitors who found a website through search engines, such as Google or Bing. Here’s how it flows:
• Users enter a query, keyword, or phrase in a search engine
• Ideally, one of your pages would come up in the non-paid search results
• User clicks on your website or webpage
• You just scored organic traffic!
If SEO (search engine optimization) is a big part of your ongoing digital marketing efforts, one of your goals is to see an increase in organic traffic. This means your website is ranking more for topics and queries that match user searches. In other words, your website is being seen more by the right audiences.
Direct Traffic
Direct visitors are those who type a website URL into the address bar of their web browser. A lot of direct traffic is supported by brand awareness and consideration, and it takes time, customer loyalty, and a ton of marketing effort to get there. For example, Nordstrom, Amazon, and YouTube probably have great direct traffic data considering how hard it is to score this.
Paid Traffic
Paid traffic is the traffic collected from different channels when utilizing Pay Per Click, or PPC, advertising. This just so happens to be a sweet spot service of Sage Digi, so we’d love to tell you exactly how custom paid advertising strategies will not only boost Paid traffic numbers, but increase brand visibility and conversion rates.
In the meantime before you contact us to chat more, here are some ways to refresh your paid ad strategies:
• Analyze which social channels your target audience is using (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc.)
• Find high-volume, low-competition keywords for ad campaigns
• Incorporate relevant (and exciting!) CTAs in ad copy
Create a Custom Paid Ad Strategy with Sage Digi!
Social Media Traffic
Social Media traffic is pretty straightforward. It’s the total amount of visits your website receives from social media channels like Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and so on. One great thing about social media traffic is that you don’t have to do much to maintain it (besides have some sort of social media posting strategy), but your reach and overall campaign success can be elevated by paying to promote with ads.
Remember, once you create ads on social media, the traffic will be categorized under Paid.
Referral Traffic
Referral traffic is supported by those who have visited your website via a link on another website. Think of Referral traffic as a nice set of recommendations from others who value your product, services, or expertise.
Email Traffic
If you currently run email marketing campaigns, the visitors who click on links within your emails will fall under this category. Email traffic is one of the most valuable since it’s supported by both existing and new audiences.
The Quality and Quantity of Website Traffic
Now that you’re up to speed on the different types of website traffic and how each plays a role in learning how users find, navigate, and interact with your site, please remember one point:
The quality of website can mean a lot more than the quantity.
This phrase seems to apply to a lot in life, right? Well, that’s because it’s true! You may be seeing crazy high numbers of website visitors every month, but if no conversions are coming from these visits, it doesn’t mean much.
On the contrary, if you’re seeing a large amount of traffic but aren’t getting any conversions, it’s time to take a step back and think why. Are users coming to my site and not finding what they’re looking for? Is my website navigation not user-friendly? Are my ads not targeting the correct audiences for my campaigns? If you’re unsure of any of those answers, give us a shout and we’d be more than happy to dig in!
Is your current website traffic helping you meet marketing goals? We would love to help you find out!