What are the Different Types of Web Traffic?
Web Traffic
Web traffic refers to the visits that your website receives. Not all visits are created equal. Knowing the different traffic sources that bring people to your site will help you understand how to improve it.
To properly analyze web traffic, you must be able to distinguish between the total number of visits during a given period and the number of unique visitors, since the same person may visit the site several times.
You should also take into account factors related to the quality of the visit, such as duration or number of page views.
Why web traffic is important for SMBs?
Website traffic, whether direct, referral, social, organic or paid traffic, is important for small businesses. It offers brand awareness and assists in producing online sales. Utilizing web traffic along with SEO gives a business the best chance at attracting organic traffic. It gives them a better chance at converting leads into customers.
The Main Types of Web Traffic:
Direct Traffic
As the name suggests, direct traffic refers to the users who travel directly to your digital website, without taking a journey through a search engine. Generally, direct traffic measures the users who type a URL directly into the browser or have a bookmark for the website saved.
For the majority of websites, direct traffic will consist of returning users and customers. After all, a user will have probably visited your website beforehand if they know the URL. In many cases, all returning users will need to do is simply type in the first few characters of a URL and they’ll be able to take use of the browser’s autofill feature.
Referral Traffic
Referral traffic is when users are directed to your website through external links. By external, we mean any links that aren’t internal (from your own website) or come from Google itself. Referral traffic can be extremely valuable as it shows Google that people are taking the time to link to your digital content. It suggests users see benefits to your website, so much so that they want to share it with others.
Social Traffic
As one might expect (for the third time), social traffic is characterised by the users that take the social media route to your website. Links from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram and more marketing account for this kind of traffic.
Each time a user clicks a link you’ve embedded into a post, image or tweet, your website will be credited with some social traffic. Understanding how much social traffic your website is getting is great knowledge to have alongside the data you’re provided from each respective platform’s analytic tools.
Organic Traffic
Perhaps it’s harder to work out exactly what this type of traffic is just from the title. Or perhaps it isn’t. Organic traffic refers to the number of users that reach your marketing website through a SERP that don’t click on a paid advertisement.
Let’s get back to basics for a moment. When a user types in a query on Google, they’ll be provided with millions of links that Google thinks will be relevant to their search. Unless specified to be an Ad, all of these links will be organic search results. When one of these links is clicked, the website it belongs to will be credited with a session from organic traffic.
What traffic type is best?
Is one source of traffic better than the other? The answer is, yes and no. For the yes, it really depends on your industry. For the service industry, many people find what they need through searches. Someone with a plumbing emergency is going to search “plumbers” instead of clicking on the Facebook ad they saw last week. So, if you’re a plumber ?? and only have time to focus on one kind of traffic, SEO and organic traffic might be your thing.
However, for the “no” part of the answer, both sources of traffic are ideal for a healthy online presence. And often go hand in hand ?. If you’re working on improving your SEO, it also means that you’re providing super helpful resources for your customer. That could easily be implemented into a paid traffic strategy. The bottom line is, you have to figure out what you have time and money for. And where your business needs to go. Then you can focus on what you are able to within that framework.