Web traffic channels

Traffic is the bread and butter of websites existence. It is what defines the sustainability of an e-commerce web but also crucial for websites which its main purpose is awareness or content development (e.g: Blogs, Information)

In this post, we explain the 5 key channels of web traffic, its differences and the strategy to succeed in each one of them.

Direct

Direct traffic are the visitors that type the web directly in their web browser, e.g: typing “www.nike.com” in Safari or Explorer.

To be able to develop this traffic channel, the efforts of the Marketing team need to be directed towards creating Brand awareness. Meaning the recognition and knowledge of the Brand name by the population. Strategies to achieve this are branding and advertising campaigns.

Organic

Here, it starts to get interesting from SEO and web positioning point of view. Organic traffic refers to the visitors that arrive to the web from a search engine (e.g. Google). The visitor typed “running shoes” and Google returned “www.nike.com” in the top ranking positions of webs found. To excel at this, the strategy of the Marketing team are focused on SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and creating good content in the web, so customers land into the web after finding answers / posts to questions typed in the search engine.

Paid

Paid traffic is also a vital channel to make a web popular. Google and other search engines provide a platform where web managers can bid money in certain words / sentences that people browse. As a result the web will appear as one of the first results when the customer searches for that word / sentence. Related to our example, we could go to Google Ads and invest 1,000 USD in the word “running shoes”. The web then would rank in top positions in Google and we will get more visits to the web.

Referrals

This channel consists of links pointing to the web, placed in otherInternet webs. This is called backlinks in SEO terms. The Strategy to increase the backlinks pointing to a specific web are based on generating good and abundant content, and participate in influencing webs.

Social

The last channel refers to the visitors arrived from Social networks links. To engage visitors and customers to a website today is very important to have an active Social Network Strategy. Through popular social networks posts, visitors click on the web link. The Strategy here implies posting regularly engaging content in FB, IG, Twitter, Youtube, and the rest of the networks.