Web Traffic Sources

Visitors are the ones driving traffic to your website and sustaining it. Basically, a website would be nothing without visitors, because it would serve no purpose. One way to comprehend how these entire process works is by understanding traffic sources themselves.

So, would you like to find out more about web traffic sources? You’ve come to the right place, then.

Web Traffic Sources metric can basically estimate the traffic sources that are providing your website with visitors and compares each of these sources. The main traffic sources are search, direct and referral. However, your website can also get traffic from things such as paid searches or banner ads. Moreover, it also analyzes the goal completions number from every source.

In other words, traffic sources can be analyzed to offer you more information about the web traffic your site gets. As an example, take the search traffic. It can be analyzed by the landing page and associated keyword rankings. At the same time, referral traffic can be analyzed in categories, like blog mentions, social referrals and service listings.

In addition, every source indicates your website’s health. If the referral traffic volume is high, it shows that your website is popular on the 3rd party website or social media.

In order to be more aware of your website’s web traffic sources, you can add the metric to your SEO performance dashboard.

As mentioned above, there are more traffic sources, and each one brings your website traffic in a different way. These traffic sources are:

Referral traffic shows the visitors that access your site by clicking on an URL from an outside source. For instance, if content from your website is shared on social media websites such as Facebook or Twitter, people are likely to click on them.

This traffic source shows the number of visitors that access your website through dedicated campaigns or clicking on links with certain tracking parameters.

As probably obvious, direct traffic shows you the visitors that access your website by typing the URL into the browser bar, or through an undefined channel.

This type of traffic source shows the visitors that find out about your website when they enter certain keywords on search engines, such as Bing, Yahoo or Google. If they click on it, it generates organic search traffic.

No traffic source is above the other, as it all depends on a website’s nature. In order to generate traffic, you should:

– Have a variety of traffic sources and not focus on one, because it minimizes the risk of your website being decimated in case your main source dries up

– Create content that targets topics and not keywords. The audience is important and you should build your website while thinking about it. Check other possible content resources and get inspired by them. To sum up, web traffic sources shows how many visitors your website gets and in which ways. You should now be more aware of it and what each web traffic source means.