W eb site traffic comes from a wide variety of sources, each providing great value to your website’s overall performance, depending on the results you want to achieve. The following are some of the most common traffic sources and some ways to improve traffic generation:
- Organic search – organic search traffic is basically the amount of traffic that comes to your website through search engines. To know the key search terms that these visitors use to get to your website is crucial to create a more targeted organic search campaign.
- Referrals – referral traffic is traffic that comes your website’s way through inbound links and depending on the program or system that you use to track traffic sources, what is included in this statistic may vary. For instance, it may or may not include referred traffic from social media sites or other referring links. One way to measure referrals in a more precise manner is to define exactly what you want to include as referral traffic and exclude other sources like social networks.
- Social media – social media traffic is obviously traffic that comes through social networks. This may include a person or subscriber tweeting a link to your site or posting a link that points to your website or your Facebook page. To track these links is an important aspect of improving website traffic.
- Email marketing – traffic can also come from email marketing efforts by including links that lead back to your website. Adding a call to action to your email messages will encourage target consumers to read more of your content, convert, and subscribe to what you are offering, among other actionable requests.
- Paid search – running a PPC campaign and pushing other paid advertisements attracts paid search traffic, among the most targeted types of traffic you can attain.
- Direct traffic – direct traffic is traffic that you receive when web users directly type in your domain name into the search and address bars. You can earn more direct traffic by making your website name more visible in your marketing campaigns, both online and offline.
