By Sol Gonzalez, on 21 July 2023
In marketing, it's not enough to know how many people are visiting your website; you also have to know where they come from. Identifying different types of web traffic allows you to segment your audience and see which of your strategies gives you the best ROI.
Let's dive in!
10 Different Types of 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.
It would be best if you also took into account factors related to the quality of the visit, such as duration or number of page views.
1. Organic Traffic
Organic traffic is the gold standard of web traffic. It's the number of visitors who land on your website after searching for a keyword or phrase on Google or other search engines. This type of traffic is highly valuable because it's made up of people who are already interested in what you offer.
To get more organic traffic, you need to optimize your website for search engines. This means creating high-quality content relevant to your target keywords and building backlinks from other high-quality websites.
While organic traffic is often "free," it's inaccurate. Although you're not paying directly for each click, optimizing your website for SEO takes time, effort, and resources. But the investment is worth it because organic traffic can be a major source of long-term growth for your website.
2. Direct Traffic
Direct traffic comes from people who type your website's URL directly into their browser, bookmark your website, or click on a link in an email that doesn't track the referral source.
Examples of direct traffic include:
- Visitors who manually type your website's URL into their browser's address bar.
- Visitors who have saved your website's URL in their bookmarks or favorites and access it from there.
- Visitors who click on a link in an email or document that is not indexed and does not track referral sources.
To maximize direct traffic potential, it is important to have clean simple, memorable URLs. Encouraging users to bookmark your website for future visits can also help retain direct traffic.
3. Referral Traffic
This type of web traffic refers to people entering a website by clicking on a link from another site like a blog or a forum.
Increasing referral traffic involves participating in active link-building activities, like guest blogging or submitting your site to directories. However, it's crucial to take into account Google’s policies on links to avoid possible penalties.
4. Email Marketing
If you’re doing email marketing campaigns, you can measure their success by tracking how many visitors come to your site through your messages.
Email marketing management programs provide plenty of information about your delivery rate, opening rate, clicks on links, total clicks, unique clicks, etc.
To improve web traffic from email marketing, we recommend implementing the following best practices:
- Conduct A/B tests with different variations of the same email to optimize elements such as subject lines, images, or the timing of sending the emails.
- Utilize email marketing automation solutions to streamline and enhance the efficiency of the entire process.
5. Social Networks
This traffic source refers to visitors who arrive after clicking on a social media post. You can distinguish between the different social networks and you can go deeper into the data on clicks and interactions.
6. Paid Media
This type of traffic refers to visitors who land on your website by clicking on a pay-per-click ad on a social media platform.
Social media advertising, such as Facebook Ads or TikTok Ads, can be highly effective in driving visitors to your site while providing valuable insights into user behavior upon arrival. These social ad platforms offer comprehensive campaign data, including demographic and user interests.
7. Paid Search
This category would include users who come to your website after clicking on an ad from Google Ads or other PPC platforms.
Remember that these platforms incorporate different types of ads and locations. For example, with Google Ads you can place an ad in search results, launch a campaign on YouTube, or place banners on third-party sites, among others. In order to properly evaluate the results, you will have to distinguish between different types of campaigns.
Search engine ads are a very effective way of getting short-term traffic and an excellent complement to organic positioning or SEO strategies. To optimize results, pay close attention to keywords and location targeting.
8. Offline Traffic
While we have focused primarily on digital channels for driving website traffic, it's important to recognize that visitors may also reach your site through offline sources. Some web analytics programs, such as HubSpot, offer the ability to track and identify traffic originating from these channels.
9. Bot Traffic
Bot traffic comes from computer programs that artificially drive traffic to sites or social networks. Bots can repeatedly visit sites, thereby increasing page views, which can raise the site's ranking on SERPs. They can also spam you with advertising or try to get backlinks.
If you want to check if you're getting a lot of visits from bots, you can have a web engineer examine your site for this type of traffic. Google Analytics can also help you do this.
10. Other Campaigns
In addition to the previously mentioned types of web traffic there may be instances where you receive traffic from web campaigns that don't fit into these specific categories.
To effectively track and analyze such campaigns, we recommend creating tracking URLs. These URLs are associated with each campaign and redirect visitors to a designated landing page. Tracking URLs can be easily generated using tools like HubSpot. By using unique tracking URLs, you can filter and segment traffic based on the specific URLs and accurately attribute it to the correct campaign.
