By Sol Gonzalez, on 28 April 2022
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 review how to do so!
9 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.
You should also take 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 number of visitors who enter a website after doing a search on Google or other search engines and clicking one of the links on the results page.
This type of web traffic can account for a very significant percentage of visits in the long run. To get more organic traffic, it is necessary to apply search engine optimization (SEO) techniques.
It is often said that organic traffic is free, but this is not entirely true. Although you are not paying directly for each click, optimizing your website for SEO involves an initial investment of time and resources as well as some maintenance.
2. Direct Traffic
Direct traffic includes visitors from several different origins:
- People who have directly typed the URL of your website into their search bar.
- People who have saved your website's URL in their favorites and have arrived through it.
- People who have clicked on a link in a non-indexed document or in an opened email using email software.
In order not to lose potential direct traffic, your URLs should be clean, simple, and easy to remember. You can also invite users to bookmark your site for future visits.
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 two best practices:
- Make A/B tests with different versions of the same email to optimize factors such as subject, images, or the time when the emails are sent out.
- Use email marketing automation solutions to manage the whole process more efficiently.
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 arrive after clicking on a pay-per-click ad on a social network.
Social media ads (for example, Facebook Ads or TikTok Ads) can effectively attract visitors to your site and give you statistics on how users behave when they arrive there. Social ad platforms also provide you with a lot of data about your campaigns, like information about 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
So far, all the types of traffic we have mentioned come from digital channels. But it's also possible that visitors have come to your website from offline sources. Some web analytics programs, such as HubSpot, allow you to identify the traffic that has reached your site through these channels.
9. Other Campaigns
Finally, you may be able to identify traffic coming from web campaigns that do not exactly fit into any of the types of web traffic we’ve discussed so far.
To do this, we recommend creating tracking URLs to associate each campaign to a unique URL redirected to a landing page. You can do this using HubSpot. Tracking URLs allow you to filter traffic according to unique URLs and attribute it to the correct campaign.
