Learn about various types of website traffic sources. Google Analytics is the benchmark used to describe different website traffic sources in the digital marketing world. Website traffic refers to visitors who come to a website. In digital marketing, web traffic is a KPI linked to prospects, leads, conversions, and even revenues. Hence it is crucial to understand these types of web traffic sources and digest the nature of each one clearly.
The web traffic sources help a marketer identify the online business’s digital success and learn where the customers are entering the website. Kelsey describes different types of website traffic as a referral, direct, organic search, social, email, paid search, display, and others.
Types of Website Traffic Sources
Brief descriptions of these sources are as follows:
Referral. Referral traffic comes from sources other than search engines. This traffic arrives at the website from other websites. Google analytics track these links as referral clicks.
Direct. This traffic type is recognized when a user directly enters the website domain name into the browser’s address bar. It is the non-referral traffic since there is no search engine or referral website involved.
Organic search. Organic-search traffic is the traffic coming through search engines, for example, Google, Yahoo, or Bing. The user enters the search term or keyword on the search bar and clicks on one of the organic search results.
Social. As the name shows, this type of website traffic comes through social media websites or applications. The user clicks on a hyperlink on a social media post or a social media profile or page. For example, LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter, the user is taken to the target website.
Email. Email traffic, as the name shows, comes through an email source. Email traffic could be a user opening a regular email and clicking on a hyperlink. Email traffic also arrives through the clicks inside an email marketing campaign.
Paid search. Paid search is the traffic associated with the visitors coming on the website by clicking on a hyperlink inside an ad, sponsored post, or listing. Businesses pay for paid search clicks on search engines to appear at the top of search results.
Display. Display traffic is the traffic that comes to the website through the Google display advertising tool. When businesses advertise on Google, there is an option to choose a display campaign under Google AdWords. Ads in this category are placed on Google and its partner websites for display.
Others. Others refer to all the traffic from unknown sources, which Google cannot trace.
When a visitor from any of the traffic sources land on a web page and engages with the design and content on the page and then fills out a contact form, sign up, registers for a service or subscription, downloads material from the website, or shares his information, it becomes a sales qualified lead (Beginner, 2019). Sales qualified leads are ideal contacts a business is aiming for. The traffic-to-lead journey of these web traffic sources is relative and depends on many factors. The study will investigate the role of web traffic sources for our case company and how they interact with website experience elements.
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