In marketing, it's not enough to know how many people visit your website; you also need to know where they come from. Identifying different types of web traffic allows you to segment your audience and see which of your strategies gives you the best ROI.

Let's review how to do it! Don't forget that at Zapiplay we help you create your own website for your business.

Web traffic" refers to visits to your website. Not all visitors are the same. Knowing the different sources of traffic that bring people to your site will help you understand how to improve it.

To properly analyse web traffic, you must be able to distinguish between the total number of visits during a given period and the number of unique visitors, as the same person may visit the site several times.

You should also take into account factors related to the quality of the visit, such as duration or number of page views.

1. Organic Traffic

Organic traffic is the number of visitors who come to a website after performing a search on Google or other search engines and clicking on one of the links on the results page.

This type of web traffic can represent a very important percentage of visits in the long term. To get more organic traffic, it is necessary to apply search engine optimisation (SEO) techniques.

It is often said that organic traffic is free, but this is not entirely true. Although you are not directly paying for each click, optimising your website for SEO involves an initial investment of time and resources, as well as some maintenance.

2. Direct Traffic

Direct traffic includes visitors from a number of different origins:

• People who have typed your website URL directly into their search bar.
• People who have saved the URL of your website in their favourites and have come through it.
• People who have clicked on a link in a non-indexed document or in an email opened using email software.
• To avoid losing potential direct traffic, your URLs should be clean, simple and easy to remember. You can also invite users to bookmark your site for future visits.

3. Reference traffic

This type of web traffic refers to people who enter a website by clicking on a link from another site, such as a blog or a forum.

Increasing referral traffic involves engaging in active link building activities, such as guest blogging or submitting your site to directories. However, it is essential to be aware of Google's linking policies to avoid possible penalties.

4. E-mail marketing

If you are running email marketing campaigns, you can measure your success by tracking how many visitors come to your site through your messages.

Email marketing management software provides a lot of information about your delivery rate, open rate, link clicks, total clicks, unique clicks, etc.

To improve web traffic from email marketing, we recommend two best practices:

• Perform A/B tests with different versions of the same email to optimise factors such as the subject line, images or the time the emails are sent.
• Use email marketing automation solutions to manage the entire process more efficiently.

5. Social Networking

This traffic source refers to visitors who arrive after clicking on a social media post. You can distinguish between the different social networks and you can drill down into the click and interaction data.

6. Paid media

This type of traffic refers to visitors who arrive after clicking on a pay-per-click ad on a social network.

Social media ads (e.g. Facebook Ads or TikTok Ads) can effectively drive visitors to your site and provide you with statistics on how users behave when they get there. Social ad platforms also provide you with a wealth of data about your campaigns, such as demographic and user interest information.

7. Paid search

This category would include users who come to your website after clicking on a Google Ads ad or other PPC platforms.

Remember that these platforms incorporate different types of ads and placements. For example, with Google Ads you can place an ad in search results, launch a campaign on YouTube or place banners on third-party sites, among others. In order to properly evaluate the results, you will need to distinguish between different types of campaigns.

Search engine advertising is a very effective way to get short-term traffic and an excellent complement to organic or SEO strategies. To optimise results, pay close attention to keywords and geographic targeting.

8. Offline traffic

So far, all the types of traffic we have mentioned come from digital channels. But it is also possible that visitors have come to your website from offline sources. Some web analytics software, such as HubSpot, allows you to identify the traffic that has come to your site through these channels.

9. Other campaigns

Finally, you may be able to identify traffic coming from web campaigns that do not exactly fit into any of the web traffic types we have discussed so far.

To do this, we recommend creating tracking URLs to associate each campaign with a unique URL that redirects to a landing page. You can do this using HubSpot. Tracking URLs allow you to filter traffic based on unique URLs and attribute it to the correct campaign.