Campaign Traffic And Other Traffic Sources For A Website
When we talk about traffic, there can be several sources types that your website can get traffic from.
Knowing how traffic is classified and what is the origination source is a must for everyone who owns a website or deals with online marketing.
In this post we’ll see what traffic types are available: direct, referral, organic, campaign traffic , social, etc… and what they mean.
Direct Traffic
Direct traffic comes when someone types your URL into their browser, or bookmark you.
Usually, these will be people who know you and came from no referring website.
These can be a site employees that visit their company site, customers may also count as direct traffic and even email clicks that don’t pass referring information.
more options are mobile apps, mobile traffic and non-secure site (http vs. https) that will not pass referral information.
Referral Traffic
Google is reporting Referral traffic for visits that came to your website from sources other than its search engine.
Analytics will track click on a hyperlink that opens a new page on a different website and will count this as a referral visit to the second site.
A good example for such traffic is finding a website URL on different posts or comments.
When people click and navigate to your site the referral counter rise.
Referral can be very good on rainy days when search engine traffic is skim and you don’t get much traffic.
Search Traffic (Organic Traffic)
Search engine traffic refers to the visitors who arrive at a website by clicking search results leading to that particular website.
This type is also known as organic search engine traffic.
Every website wants to increase the organic visitors that come from search engines like Google, Bing , Ask,Baidu and others.
This is where SEO (search engine optimization) takes place.
If you can place many keywords for a website to appear in the first search engines pages and to dominate the SERP (search engine results pages),
then you’re likely to get more visitors or organic traffic.
Paid search ads that you see in the search are not included as organic.
Of course, they have some impact on the traffic flow because people do click on them and thus giving up on other results, an action the decrease organic flow to other sites.
Organic should be your first priority traffic channel and you should get at least 40-50% from this source.
Campaign Traffic (Paid Search)
Campaign traffic comes from running campaigns like Google AdWords, email blasts, banner ads, Buying Visitors,
placing Ads, buy website traffic. With Campaign traffic, you can improve your marketing efforts and user experiences.
campaign traffic offers you wonderful opportunities to measure the effectiveness of your online marketing efforts.
On most systems, your campaign can be focused by relevant niche or keyword and have a geo targeting audience.
It should be around 10-20 percent of your traffic.
Social Traffic
These will be traffic coming from a social network such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, or Instagram.
Because social networks are so popular these days, it no surprise to see many sites getting a large portion of traffic from there.
It’s one of the more engaging traffic types because of the nature of activity in social networks.
Try to make this traffic source to be 10% or more from your whole traffic.
Email Campaign
This can be very powerful traffic source if you have the right audience.
To classify this type, you run an email marketing campaign tagged with an email parameter.
Getting leads from email prospects is a nice add-on to other traffic types you have.
While this post was mainly about how Google measures the traffic coming to a site, there are others ways and measures to do that.
Few tools like Alexa rely on other parameters but they less important for the most website.
Building your name and reputation is important and until you have a strong brand name you can buy traffic visitors to your website on a regular basis.