Importance of Web Traffic
Website traffic refers to web users who visit a website. Web traffic is measured in visits, sometimes called "sessions," and is a common way to measure an online business effectiveness at attracting an audience.
When ecommerce took off in the 1990s, the metric of web traffic was first viewed as the most important means of determining a website's popularity, as other metrics did not yet exist to gauge online success.
Your web traffic sources can be mainly categorized into four:
· Direct Traffic
· Referral Traffic
· Paid Traffic (Campaign Traffic)
· Organic Search
Direct Traffic –If you are receiving copious amounts of direct traffic then – Voila! You have a lot to be excited about. Direct traffic represents your loyal readers or repeat visitors! If you are running an e-commerce website, then this traffic signifies your existing satisfied customers who are re-visiting your site to purchase more! Direct visitors are the ones who know your brand well and recognize you as a subject matter expert or a solutions provider.
Referral Traffic – This type of traffic can be further broken down into individual referrers and referring domains. Individual referrers are the individual pages on a website that sends traffic to your website. And referring domain traffic is the sum total of all the traffic coming from a single domain.
Organic Search Traffic – This kind of traffic is a tell-tale sign that your website is ranking high for certain keywords in the search engine results. That’s awesome news! However, it doesn’t include the traffic coming from your Pay-Per-Click ads that also pop-up near the search results. So, the higher you are ranking for competitive keywords, the more organic search traffic you will receive on your website.
Ad or Campaign Traffic – If you are looking to increase targeted traffic to your website with minimum effort and time, then you got to run online ads. This traffic can cost you some money, but it can draw thousands of visitors to your website in a very short time. This traffic is almost instantaneous provided your ad campaigns are successful! Unlike organic search traffic, you need not spend weeks or months slogging to write quality articles for your website and wait patiently for them to rank high in the search results to receive organic search traffic.
As a business owner, it’s vital to keep track of both the actual numbers and percentages of these above traffic sources. It will not only expose the shortfalls of your marketing campaigns but also let you do a comparative study of where your traffic is originating from. The resultant data from this study is vital for optimizing your marketing efforts and fine-tuning your traffic acquisition techniques.
organic search traffic can certainly lead to higher conversions if the traffic has a good amount of quality leads. A higher volume of organic search traffic need not always translate into higher sales volume if the percentage of qualified prospects is low. In a survey conducted by MarketingSherpa.com among business owners, almost all of their participants marked search engines as the top source of website traffic – both in terms of volume and quality.
Talking about ad or campaign traffic, you must analyze which PPC ads are sending you the most qualified leads, and which type of ads are leading to better conversions. Is it banner ads, text ads or is it some other type of ads? The same goes with every traffic source that you are tracking.
A common misconception about website traffic is that any traffic is good traffic. It is important to remember that you are not trying to attract everyone to your site but people who are interested in your topic or what you are selling.
Of course, you can make money with higher traffic, generally speaking, with higher volume but it will be short term and unpredictable. Many successful marketers know that driving targeted traffic to your site will generate the most long-term revenue.
Priya Kesharwani [MBA]
Marketing Manager
https://www.portrait-business-woman.com/2022/07/priya-kesharwani.html
priya.aircrews@gmail.com
