What Is Online Traffic And Why Its A Must In Any Business
What Is Online Traffic
So what is online traffic and why do you need it for your business?
Not to be confused with traffic on the road web traffic online represents the number of people that visit a website at any given time. In order to make money online in any profession, online traffic plays a vital role.
After all what good is a website if you have no visitors visiting that website? To better understand in-depth what traffic is all about online let’s look at the definition below…
According to Wikepidia.com “Web traffic is the amount of data sent and received by visitors to a website. This amount necessarily does not include the traffic generated by bots. Since the mid-1990s, web traffic has been the largest portion of Internet traffic”
So How Is Online Traffic Recorded?
Traffic is recorded in various ways. Usually by having tracking software on the host website ( a piece of javascript code ) that records key metrics about the user. Some popular software includes Google Analytics and Google Search Console.
.
General information recorded gives webmasters important information about their audience. This helps them to better understand their target audience and serve them at the highest level by offering products or services relevant to their audience.
Some feel worried about the idea of their actions are being tracked but don’t worry…
Information is recorded in a very general sense. This software doesn’t tie a particular user to the recorded information…
Stuff like your phone number, exact location, and other sensitive data isn’t recorded.
For example, let’s say you have a blog about snowboarding. You’re currently making sales but you have no idea who is visiting your website. After checking google analytics it reveals that:
80% percent of your customers are men between the ages of 25- 30
and 20% are women between the age of 35-40.
With this information, it would make sense to split-test your ads and content with the dominant age range showing interest in your product. If you know 90% of your visitors are on mobile you can also optimize things for that device and so on.
Using detailed metrics will help you make the best-educated decisions and tailor your content for your audience rather than blindly advertise or sell a product without knowing who you’re speaking to. This allows marketers to be more precise with their marketing strategy and double down on conversions.
What Is Online Traffic: Other Important Metrics You Should Know
Traffic isn’t the only key metric recorded with tracking software. As mentioned above… And it is not the most important metric that should be used in testing a website. There are many other factors that determine a website’s success such as bounce rate (aka time spent on the page), Most visited URLs, Location, device type used, and more.
We’ll break down some of these types of traffic below…
Different Types Of Website Traffic
The web is a huge place and with that comes many different ways to acquire traffic. Several different forms of traffic include…
Organic traffic: SEO.
Organic social media traffic: Organic from Facebook groups or posts.
PPC: Paid traffic like Facebook, Google, Instagram, and other paid channels.
Referral Traffic: Visitors that come to your website from other sites. This could be things like link building and forums. It could also be different forms of social media traffic.
Direct traffic: Those who type in your website without it appearing in organic search results.
Traffic On Your Email List: Those who have given you their email address from forms or for other products they purchased.
The cool thing about tracking software is that it will break down the web sessions by location, type of device as well as which channel the traffic came through. All of this traffic combined plays a very important role in assessing a website’s performance.
So Now You Know What Is Online Traffic…
But Is All Traffic Created Equal?
In short, the answer is no…
Any traffic does not mean good traffic. Just like any meal is not a good meal. Am I right?
The last thing you wanna do as a marker is drive any type of traffic to your offers. That would truly be a waste of time and money. For example, A billboard is considered the old method of advertising.
Why? Because most of the people seeing it are not the target customer. So you may get sales from that billboard but in the end, you’re wasting ad spend dollars targeting everyone on the freeway. There will be a large majority of people who never look at that offer. You don’t wanna do the same thing by wasting money with your website.
There’s a thing in marketing called traffic temperature and each one converts at a different rate. Traffic overall falls into 1 of 3 categories. Regardless of the traffic source.
1. Cold Traffic
2. Warm Traffic
3. Hot Traffic
Cold Traffic: Those who have never heard of your product or brand are generally cold traffic. These people take a little more relationship-building before they convert to a sale. These particular customers are usually aware of concerned with a general problem but are unaware of the active solutions to the problem they face.
Warm Traffic: Those who already have an interest in what your selling or something closely related. These customers may have already seen your ads or landed on your website page. They also may have already given you their email address as a lead. Most under this category have yet to make a purchase.
Hot Traffic: The most valuable and highest converting of the 3 chances are these customers know about your product or your brand. They are already on your email list and are actively purchasing products from you already. They have seen your ads, most likely seen your website, and are aware of the products and solutions you provide.
in a coming article, we will discuss more about traffic temperature and how to use it to match your product or service with your audience.
How Can You Increase Your Website Traffic
There are many different ways to increase traffic to your website. It really depends on the type of traffic you want to use.
Whether it be paid traffic or SEO. It’s good to remember each of these types of traffic is at a different stage in the customer lifecycle. When you’re using SEO to show up organically (free) in Google these customers are actively looking for a solution to their problem. They are typing specific questions into Google and are finding your pages and website as a result.
When you’re using paid traffic rather, customers looking for you you are finding the customers and targeting them based on specific interests and behaviors they may have. These customers are usually busy doing something already like browsing on Facebook or Google. With this type of traffic, you have to spend more time grabbing your customer’s attention and taking them from the current platform they’re on to your specific offer.
So with the first method, you’re directing customers that are already interested in your offer and with the second you’re hailing down traffic to visit your offer.
It’s been proven in marketing that organic traffic converts at a significantly higher rate than paid traffic but organic traffic takes longer to create a consistent stream of visitors. This traffic is free and can end up being something well worth it for your business.
Below are 5 free ways you can start increasing your website traffic today.
1. Choose your keywords correctly:
Targeting the right keywords will have a big impact on whether your articles rank in Google. Targeting keywords that have a high search volume with low competition will give you the highest success rate. You can find these keywords with keyword research tools like Jaxxy.
2. Submit your site to search engines:
After writing your content you wanna be sure to submit it to Google through Google Search Console. This will have your article crawled by Google and indexed quickly.
If you don’t do this you will be hoping and praying that Google indexes your site automatically and that can take months.
3. Share your content on social media:
Why not share your content where your audience is already hanging out?
You can do this by building a business Facebook page or group.
4. Try youtube marketing:
Youtube is another excellent way to reach a broad audience. Creating youtube videos for your niche and including them in your blog can create a valuable stream of traffic to any website.
5. Produce content regularly:
The fresher your content is the better it will rank in the eyes of Google. Your audience will have something to look forward to if they know there will be updated content about topics that interest them. So write content regularly and give your audience a reason to come back to your website.
By understanding website metrics and using a solid traffic generation strategy you will be able to gradually increase your website visitors. So the real question is which strategy are you going to use?
Interested In Learning Seo For free To Improve Your Website Traffic?
Click the button below to claim your free SEO course
but only for a limited time!
Conclusion:
So there you have it, ladies and gentlemen. What Is online traffic, how it’s measured, and how you can get more of it to explode your online business. I hope this article was helpful to you. By properly understanding how website traffic works you will be able to use the information to optimize your offers for maximum conversions and build a better relationship with your audience in the end.
As always if you have any comments or questions about today’s article feel free to leave them below as comments are always welcome in the discussion.
Want more information about how to build a profitable online business?
Click Here for more marketing resources.
See you in the next article! 🙂
