Types of website traffic

We’re living in the age of the information revolution. According to the UN’s figures, an internet user spends, on average, 6 hours and 53 minutes online daily. Throughout this duration, every video you watch, every meme you see, and every site you visit are all information in some form. This is the race that every content creator is running in: the race to grab the most set of eyeballs.

These eyeballs, i.e., the number of visits a website achieves, are referred to as the website’s traffic. So, the greater the traffic, the more successful the website is. Wrong.

Quality of Traffic

Just because a user visited your website doesn’t mean you’ve converted them into a consumer of your content. There’s a high probability that they visited the page and either exited in under 10 seconds or didn’t explore your website any further.

These users don’t help your website’s engagement because they need to engage with it. This measure is known as a bounce rate. The inverse of this is called Engagement Rate.

Even if a visitor doesn’t explore your website further, the time spent on their visited page is equally important. The more time visitors spend on that page, the better the page performs regarding numbers. This gives the page a higher standing in the search engine’s results when users search for phrases or terms featured prominently on the webpage.

All of these factors contribute to you converting the visitor into a consumer, which is the end goal. If your webpage is marketing a product, then the number of users who buy it would be the number of consumers. This statistic is called the conversion rate. Your website will be more successful if the conversion rate is higher.

Now, for a higher conversion rate, the quality of traffic is of paramount importance. If your users don’t engage with your website, your traffic is of low quality. To improve the quality of your website’s traffic, you must analyze where you achieve higher quality traffic and market your content accordingly.

This is where the different types of online traffic come into play. This post (https://cannibals.digital/best-tools-for-comparing-web-traffic/) will make it simple for you to compare site traffic.

Types of online traffic

Organic Traffic

The amount of people who visit your website once it appears in their search results is represented by this figure. These viewers voluntarily click on your website because your content is what they want, so they usually stay longer. This is the most coveted form of traffic, being free and high-quality. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) helps increase organic traffic by using frequently searched terms, higher-quality featured images, etc.

Referral Traffic

This refers to the people who visit your website when they come across its link on another website, blog, YouTube channel, etc. Showcasing your website wherever you can by submitting it to directories or collaborating with other content creators helps increase this traffic.

However, Google has policies regarding referrals, so ensure that you comply with them to avoid a penalty.

Paid Traffic

As the name suggests, this refers to the users who visit your website through advertisements and endorsements you pay for. For instance, Google Ads allows sites or companies to pay Google on a cost-per-click basis and display their websites as ads in Google’s search results.

Social Media Traffic

These users find your website through social media channels like Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, etc. The best way to increase this traffic is to post your content or links to your website on social media platforms.

However, keep in mind that Google Analytics doesn’t factor other social media traffic into account. So any traffic you receive on other social media platforms won’t contribute to your website’s SEO in Google’s search results.

Direct Traffic

The visitors who visit your website by directly putting its name or URL in the search bar. As you can tell, this is the kind of traffic reserved chiefly for popular sites like YouTube, Facebook, Google, etc. It would help if you drove your brand to high popularity levels to earn direct traffic to ensure consumers remember its name.

Bot Traffic

Bots are prevalent throughout the Internet. They may be scouting the Internet to analyze trends, such as the bots Google uses, or accomplishing whatever task they were designed for. This traffic is useless and doesn’t contribute to your traffic.

Other sources

Marketing can be done via email newsletters, offline campaigns, etc. Any traffic gained through these sources doesn’t contribute to SEO, but the visitors still contribute to your website’s traffic.

The easiest way to calculate your website’s traffic is using Google Analytics. You can only gain an audience when you know your market. Analyzing the types of traffic your website receives is necessary to figure out how to market your website.