Understanding your website’s traffic sources is essential for successful online marketing.
Knowing your biggest traffic sources will help you know where your target audience is so you can ramp up your content promotion efforts to continue getting the best from those platforms.
But that’s not all.
You’ll also know which sources are under-utilized so you can start leveraging them.
What Are Traffic Sources?
Traffic sources are channels through which visitors reach out to your website.
By identifying and tracking these sources, you better understand your audience and make data-driven decisions to improve the performance of your website.
Traffic sources are categorized into organic, referral, and direct sources.
1. Organic
Organic refers to visitors that land on your site from unpaid sources.
Organic search forms a major source of website traffic.
Organic search drives consistent traffic to your website from top search engines, such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, and more.
Here are the steps to increase organic search traffic:
- Improve your SEO rankings by conducting keyword research and including relevant content.
- Consider frequently blogging to boost accessible content.
- Prioritize improving your site’s performance and speed.
2. Referral
Referral traffic refers to visits to your website due to people clicking on links on other websites.
Referral traffic sources include; review sites, news outlets, online listings, podcasts, social media, and guest posts.
You can accrue more referral traffic by:
- Appearing on review sites like Yelp
- Commenting on blog posts
- Sharing post links on social media platforms
- Publishing guest posts on other websites and linking back to your site
- Asking influencers to link to your posts
- Publishing content on online directories
- Publishing an infographic on Pinterest and linking back to a blog post
- Publish press releases on news outlets when launching a product or planning an event.
- Post engaging and valuable content consistently.
- For social media platforms that do not support external links, consider using link-in bio tools such as Shorby, Taplink, Everlinks, Linktree, and Tap Bio.
- Include your website link in the bio section.
Bonus Tips on Driving More Traffic from Social Media
Understand social timing
Know the best days and times to post on Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Instagram and the rest.
According to research by Coschedule, the best days to post on social media are Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 8.41 am, 3.15 pm, and 7.00 pm. You can check their recommended best post times for different platforms here.
3. Direct
Direct website traffic is visitors who arrive at your website directly.
The following are ways they occur;
- Users who directly type your website’s URL into their browser
- Users who enter your website through saved bookmarks
- Following links from sources like PDFs.
- Clicking on links from in Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp
- Clicking on links in email marketing campaigns
Ways to increase direct traffic:
- Create engaging downloadable content such as PDF ebooks
- Creating a remarkable website with exciting content that will entice the user to save the bookmark
- Share your website URL offline on flyers, billboards, or business cards
Bonus: Tips to Drive More Direct Traffic through Email Marketing
- Email previous customers with links to your website as you pre-sell other offers.
- Send a free report (lead market) and include links to your website.
- Email your subscribers once you post a new blog post so they can check it out.
- Include your website URL in your email signature.
How to Calculate Traffic Sources
The following are steps to calculate traffic sources;
Set up a Google Analytics 4 account and connect it to your website
In the dashboard, click Reports:
Click Acquisition
Click Traffic Acquisition to see all traffic sources and the visitors for each. The upper section shows a graph and bar chart of traffic sources.
Scroll down to see a table with specific data regarding each source’s number of users, sessions, engaged sessions, engagement per session, and more metrics.
Explore each channel deeper into subcategories.
Examine critical indicators such as session duration, goal conversions, and bounce rates to evaluate the performance of each traffic source.
Find out which source needs improvement.
Conclusion
Understanding your traffic sources allows you to make informed decisions and improve your online presence.
Use the information from the traffic sources above to improve your plans, establish partnerships, and achieve online success.
