What are Traffic Sources in digital marketing...?

What are Traffic Sources in digital marketing.....?

Traffic source in the simplest form can be defined as the origin through which people found your site. Every session or visit to your website has origin or source of the hit. Whenever someone visits your website through desktop, mobile or any Internet-enabled device, the Web & Google Analytics track its source or origin, which is classified as traffic source.  

Understanding traffic sources helps derive the understanding of the sources which are driving the most and least traffic to your website. This helps businesses to shape up their SEO, SEM and SMO strategies. For example, a television commercial should show increase in your direct traffic or referral traffic depending on the type of the Web address used. Traffic sources can be easily categorized as direct traffic. Direct traffic is often defined as the user accessing your domain or website directly. Any instance of direct access to your website without any referral parameters mapped as direct tTraffic. For instance, the user typed your website address in the browser to directly access your website. Direct traffic broadly includes any hyperlink which without any referrer gets the user to your website. 

Referral Traffic: Referral traffic are sessions or visits collected from external sources. Traffic source is termed as "referrer" because it refers traffic from one website to another. Referral traffic is user accessing your webpage through known sources. This can be categorized as - banner ads, email campaigns etc. See more (Link to Referral Traffic Definition) 

Search Engines: Search engine traffic is that traffic that comes from people clicking on links on a search results page for any search engine, like Google, Bing, Yahoo or more. 

Other: These numbers include any source not classified as the above. This may be any campaign you have run on any other platform to acquire traffic.

Types of traffic sources

Traffic is the flow of internet users on the internet. When it comes to affiliate marketing, you need traffic directed to your offers or promotions in order to turn them into conversions.

Below are the most common types of traffic and their definitions:-

Mobile-

Mobile traffic is basically traffic that comes from mobile or tablet devices. If your site or offer isn’t optimized for mobile traffic then you could be missing out on a lot of conversions. Anyone who views a website on their mobile is participating to mobile traffic. You need to make sure you have specific responsive web pages to work on mobiles.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization)-

Search Engine Optimization is the process of improving a website’s visibility in a search engine’s search results. Typically, the higher up the rankings a website is shown on a search engine, the more traffic it will receive. This is called, natural traffic as you aren't directly paying the search engine to show your website in its results. SEO isn't limited to text search.

Pay Per Call-

Pay Per Call is the method whereby the merchant or advertiser will pay a commission based on a phone call. Sometimes its when someone rings a certain number or often when someone stays on a call with an agent for a minimum time. It's very popular as it allows the potential customer to have an actual conversation with the agent.

Social Media-

Social Marketing is a form of internet marketing on any social media platform or website. Social media means any platform that indulges a group of internet-based applications and audience to exchange content. The majority of social media platforms can operate on any platform or device. Facebook and Twitter are two of the biggest examples.

PPC (Pay-Per-Click)-

PPC or Pay-Per-Click is an internet advertising model used to drive traffic to websites. The advertiser typically pays a fixed charge for every click that is sent to their website. They generally set a bid on relative keywords that are searched via PPC search engines. The advertiser with the highest bid is then placed in the highest position on the rankings.

PPV (Pay-Per-View)-

PPV or Pay-Per-View, also known as CPV (Cost-Per-View), is an online advertising model. With PPV, the clue is in the title. You simply pay every time your website or landing page is viewed. An advertiser is given the freedom to target several sources including keywords and URLs. A bid is made and if you are the highest bidder on a specific target, your webpage will be shown to the user.

Display Media Buying-

Display Media buying, otherwise known as display advertising, is a method of purchasing banner ad space. You can buy ad space either directly from a website or on specific media buying ad networks. Usually, media is paid for on a CPM basis, meaning cost per 1000 impressions. However, when direct media buys from website owners, a flat rate can often be negotiated for a certain amount of time.

Email-

Email Marketing is the process of directly marketing a commercial message via email. It usually involves lists, which are groups of email addresses legally gathered by various forms. There are a lot of emailing laws set out to reduce so called SPAM, and every contact on your list, by law, must have opted in. CAN-SPAM is the governing body of email marketing and they provide the rules.