Table of Contents
Introduction
The internet is a large maze with no beginning or end point. It is vast and highly deceptive; therefore, the path to reach a website becomes very important. We always discuss leads and traffic, but from where does this traffic come? Which are the top types of traffic sources?
As a business owner striving to ace the internet, if you’re still unfamiliar with the various types of traffic sources, you need to do your homework. Traffic is the lifeblood of a website; thus, without a steady stream of traffic, your website cannot survive for long.
Since the website’s success depends on the traffic you receive, it will also affect the overall performance of your brand. Your website may be a treasure trove of valuable and relevant information, but without the right traffic, it is all useless. Therefore, this blog will explore the various types of traffic sources and how to utilize them to your advantage. In addition, you will also get some expert insights into website traffic, so keep reading the next section.
What is a traffic source?
If you’ve just started with their online website, you might be unfamiliar with the word website traffic. Therefore, before diving into the different types of traffic sources, you should first familiarize yourself with the term.
So here is a simple explanation of website traffic sources for your understanding:
A traffic source is the origin from which users arrive at your website. Businesses use several marketing strategies to put their website before their target audience. Now, imagine a scenario where you come across an ad on Instagram for a product you like. What would you do? Click on it and go to their website to learn further details.
Now, digital advertisement is a typical marketing strategy used by businesses worldwide. In this particular situation, you are the visitor who visited a business after encountering their ad online. Then, here you are: part of the traffic is the number of visitors to a particular website. So, in this case, the source is Instagram.
Now that you know website traffic, the next section will focus on its importance. Therefore, keep reading the section below to learn why businesses put so much effort into driving traffic to their website.
Why are types of traffic sources so important?
Website traffic serves as a measure of its popularity and effectiveness. But you might be wondering how this matters for business. Well, the answer is very simple: Types of traffic sources are given so much importance because they are the primary stakeholders in your business’s online success.
As you know, the world is slowly going online, and businesses are also shifting their shops online in the form of websites. In fact, many businesses make most of their profit by selling their services and products online. So, to sell stuff online through your website, you will need the customers to be able to arrive on your website. And guess what are these customers that visit your website called? Traffic.
Therefore, you must increase organic traffic (when customers do not come because of an ad you are running) to the website for your business to profit. Paid traffic (when customers learn about your brand through ads) is also important for business growth, but it can impact your ROI.
In addition, you may consider hiring SEO services and other marketing services to increase your website’s paid and organic search. Consequently, the more traffic you receive on your website, the higher your conversion rates will be. And the more conversions you have, the better the sales.
But paid and organic are not the only types of traffic sources you should focus on. Therefore, the following section will briefly explain the other traffic sources.
What are the different types of traffic sources?
When it comes to online marketing, knowing how much traffic arrives on your website is not enough. For more success, you need to know the source of the traffic and how it reaches your website. Therefore, identifying various types of traffic becomes very important to run your business.
Here is the list of some of the most basic types of traffic sources you must know about:
Organic Traffic
Organic traffic refers to the number of people that arrive on your website after researching a keyword on the search engine. Organic traffic is highly valuable among all the other types of traffic sources.
Therefore, you need to optimize your site to increase organic traffic to the website. And if you feel like you cannot do this alone, you should consider hiring SEO services.
Direct Traffic
Direct traffic comes to your business’s website when people type your site’s URL directly to the search engine. Moreover, direct traffic is also driven by bookmarking your website and clicking on email links that are not indexed. For businesses to drive direct traffic, they need to have a simple and memorable website URL.
Email Marketing
Many businesses use email marketing to direct the target audience to their website. Therefore, emails are also among the various types of traffic sources. If you are also doing an email marketing campaign, then you can easily track the number of visitors that come to your website through mail. This way, you will also be able to determine whether email marketing is worth your time.
Referral Traffic
You may have at least once in your life clicked on a link on one website and then landed on another website. This type of traffic source is called referral traffic. Referral traffic is valuable, but it also helps improve your website’s credibility. Thus, you need to focus actively on link-building activities to increase your business’s organic ranking and drive referral traffic.
Social Networks
Social media has become the go-to platform for businesses to achieve huge marketing success in less time. By building a substantial presence on social media, you can easily drive your followers to your business website.
All you have to do is post highly clickable and engaging content. These types of traffic sources can be very useful if you have a large following on social media.
Paid Search Traffic
As discussed in an example, sometimes people arrive on your website after clicking on a PPC ad on the search engine. This type of traffic source is generally what we will call paid traffic. Paid because every time users click on your website, you must pay a decided amount. While paid and organic search are both important, the former shows fast results, and the latter shows long-term benefits.
Paid Media
Like search engines, businesses also use social media advertising to promote their products and services. Social media platforms have a wealth of data and can accurately target consumers based on their preferences. So, when you use this method to drive traffic to your business’s website, it would be called paid media traffic.
Conclusion
In the end, we can all conclude that the amount of traffic your website receives determines the fate of your business. Whether your business will do well online or not will depend on whether you are using the right types of traffic sources. Moreover, sometimes, these sources also affect the quality of traffic you receive. Therefore, if you want your business to do well, you should start paying close attention to your website’s traffic.
