The Different Types of Sources For Gaining Traffic To Your Website
Although your website may receive traffic from campaigns such as banner ads or paid search, the three main traffic sources are direct, referral, and search. Understanding the sources of your website traffic is an important part of your marketing strategy. Let's break down six different types of website traffic sources so you can make educated marketing decisions about where your website traffic works best and fill in the gaps when necessary. Organic traffic is traffic that came to your website from someone who found it through a search engine.
TYPES OF SOURCE TRAFFIC
Most website analytics tools will organize your traffic sources into the following categories:
DIRECT TRAFFIC
Direct traffic is traffic that arrives at your website without going through any other channel. So, when you type www.ittechofficial.blogspot.com into your browser's search bar and press 'Enter,' you're reaching HubSpot.com directly. If, on the other hand, someone posted a link to www.ittechofficial.blogspot.com on Facebook and you clicked on that link, your visit would be recorded in ittechofficial.blogspot.com's social media sources.
Does that make sense?
To summarize, there is no referring URL when someone visits your site through direct traffic. So, if your direct traffic is increasing month after month, it suggests that more and more people know your name. Congratulations, branding team!
ORGANIC TRAFFIC
Organic search traffic used to simply refer to the quantity of traffic that arrived to your site from someone who found it through a search engine. You may then go down further to check which keywords people used to find your website. For example, we might discover that someone arrived at HubSpot.com via the keyword term "inbound marketing." This is crucial to grasp since it allows businesses to determine which keywords are generating the most traffic, leads, and customers, allowing them to create more educated content and keyword strategies.
EMAIL TRAFFIC
If you correctly tag your email campaigns with email parameters, all traffic that comes to your site from an email -mail will be shown as email traffic.
REFERRAL TRAFFIC
Referrals is one of those source names that might refer to a variety of things, because the description is simply... any website sending visitors your way via an inbound link. Isn't it a little hazy? What's included in this depends on the software or application you're using to track the sources of visitors to your site. Someone who clicks to your website from a hyperlink on another blog would be considered referral traffic.
OTHER CAMPAIGNS
Finally, if you're conducting a marketing campaign for which you've created a tracking URL but it doesn't fall into any of the other buckets, it may wind up in the vague "Other Campaigns" source. Just because something does not neatly fit into another bucket does not imply it should not be monitored, right?
UNDERSTANDING DIRECT TRAFFIC
Any traffic that comes straight to your site is referred to as direct traffic. This includes anyone who enters your URL into their web browser or clicks through from a bookmarked link. Unfortunately, direct traffic is not that obvious. According to this experiment conducted by Search Engine and Groupon, up to 60% of traffic classified as direct traffic is truly organic traffic.
HOW IT WORKS?
Well, browsers don't. It does not always indicate where visitors are coming from when they access a website. If your analytics tool can't determine where the traffic is coming from, it just assumes it's direct traffic. Since this visitor doesn't have a referral, your analytics don't know where they came from and automatically uploads them to the direct traffic bucket. Does it really matter that some of your traffic didn't rank correctly? What's the point of knowing where your traffic is coming from and doing all that work to minimize fake "direct traffic" visitors? The answer is data.
Any digital marketer knows that the best way to improve marketing tactics and attract more qualified leads is to first know where your leads are coming from and why. If you can't figure out where a lot of your direct traffic is coming from, you're missing out on a great marketing opportunity. You can't see what keywords visitors are clicking on or what terms they are searching for.
WHERE DOES MY DIRECT TRAFFIC ACTUALLY COME FROM?
Direct traffic isn't really direct, so what is it? Well, the internet isn't perfect. To give your website analytics tool the right credentials for every site visit, every little aspect of a link needs to be in tip-top shape and that doesn't always happen. That said, here are some specific reasons why you might see very high direct traffic numbers:
HTTPS → HTTP REFERALS
If you haven't secured your site yet, you have an HTTP site. This means you won't see any tracking on visitors coming from a secure, HTTPS site. It's a function of the secure protocol, and it's actually a simple solution. You just need a third-party SSL certificate and you can update your site to make it secure. Then you'll see all the referral information you need from visitors coming to your site from other secure websites.
INCORRECT FORWARDING AND MISSING OR BROKEN TRAFFIC CODES
Another big culprit of unnecessary direct traffic is that something is wrong on your end. Maybe you forgot to enter the tracking code on a new landing page. Anyone who clicks from this landing page to another page on your site will appear in Google Analytics as a new user when they reach the second page.
For Google, it looks like you referred the same visitor as you. When this happens and your domain has been banned, Google automatically uploads this visit to the direct traffic bucket. The same thing happens if your tracking codes fail or break. Bad redirects can also be the cause, in the same way. If you use anything other than SEO best practices for your redirects, you run the risk of UTM parameters being stripped. Complex redirect chains can wipe out referral data, contributing to more direct traffic for you.
TRAFFIC FROM MOBILE APPLICATIONS, DESKTOP SOFTWARE AND CERTAIN EMAIL CLIENTS
Unfortunately, sometimes there is no way to avoid direct traffic that is in fact not direct. Many mobile apps, desktop software, and some email clients, such as Outlook, simply don't pass referral information. You can tell if you're having a problem with email if you see a spike in direct traffic right after sending a large campaign email, but it can be difficult to identify traffic coming from mobile apps and office software.
Maybe you've written a great blog that people keep bookmarking, or maybe you have a great reputation in your area and people are browsing straight to your site. If you have not blocked your employees' IP addresses, you may receive direct traffic to your analytics while browsing the website. Direct traffic is a real source of traffic, so it's important to remember that some of your direct traffic may actually be browsing. directly to you. There are a variety of unnecessary direct traffic contributors.
While these are the most common and easiest to identify, you can still see direct traffic from offline sources, people sharing your site through direct messaging apps like Facebook Messenger, and more. While you can't address all of these cases, you can fix some of them to get the best possible insights into your site visitors, what they want, and where they came from.
HOW DO I REPLY TO MISCATEGEO DIRECT TRAFFIC?
Moz has a great, comprehensive guide to direct traffic in Google Analytics that not only shows you how to understand where your direct traffic is coming from, but also how to fix it. Go ahead for some detailed specific principles to follow in order to solve any problems you are having with direct traffic. For now, two of the best ways to make sure you're doing all you can to manage unnecessary direct traffic are:
MAKE SURE YOUR SITE IS HTTPS
If your site still has an HTTP web address, you'll miss the referrals I could get a lot of visitors to your site. Migrating to an HTTPS site will allow you to track referral traffic in the best possible way and has the added benefit of helping you keep up with the future of the web. You can only control what you can control when it comes to direct traffic. You cannot control browsers from mobile apps or sites that are not HTTPS.
You can control the tagging of your campaigns. the best analytics you will see of these new site visitors. Again, check with Moz for a detailed walkthrough here. For any marketer or website owner, it is important to understand the difference between direct traffic and organic traffic. I hope this blog has helped you identify the main differences between the two and provided you with some context behind some of the direct traffic issues. If you have any further questions about analysing your website's traffic sources, be sure to contact the Even bound team. Our SEO experts will be happy to answer any questions you may have.
UNDERSTANDING BIOLOGICAL TRAFFICKING
As we said before, organic traffic is any traffic coming to your site from search engines that hasn't been impacted by paid advertising. You don't know how it is? Check out our Anatomy of a SERP for a visual guide to where your organic traffic is coming from.
HOW CAN I GET ORGANIC TRAFFIC?
Organic traffic is driven by your ranking on search engine results pages. search terms related to your business, the more organic traffic you will see. Most inbound marketing tactics and strategies are based on the goal of increasing your search engine rankings to generate more organic traffic. Organic traffic is also generated by SEO or search engine optimization. The better your site is optimized for search engines, the better it is likely to rank for the search terms your ideal customers type into Google.
WHAT IS THE BIGGEST DIFFERENCE BETWEEN DIRECT AND ORGANIC TRAFFIC?
The primary distinction between direct and organic traffic is based on user intent. When you have a high volume of organic visitors, it suggests you're doing an excellent job of establishing your digital presence in order to satisfy search engines. You rank high for specified search terms, resulting in increased traffic to your website. When you have a lot of direct traffic, or when you have some of the concerns we discussed previously, or when you have a good reputation in your field.
EXAMPLE OF A SITUATION
Assume you're looking for running sneakers. If you are ready to make a decision and are a fan of Nike sneakers, you will go to Nike.com and make a purchase. This is an excellent example of high-quality direct traffic. If you're not sure which shoes are best for you, say because you're new to running or don't like Nike sneakers, you'd do a Google search for "best running shoes for beginners." When you click on a top result that is not an advertisement, you drive organic traffic to that website.
It is critical for any marketer or website owner to grasp the distinction between direct traffic and organic traffic.
We hope this blog has assisted you in identifying the fundamental distinctions between the two and providing perspective for some of the direct traffic difficulties. If you have any further concerns about analyzing the traffic sources on your website, please contact the Even bound team. Our SEO specialists will gladly address any inquiries you may have.
