Owning a website is a staple for any business owner, especially during the modern age. But are you paying attention to website traffic?
Establishing a website is every business and brand’s best friend in connecting with consumers. Owning a website allows greater credibility and trust depending on the digital strategies deployed.
Existing and potential customers can engage with a brand through information and details that are pre-established online. Thus, websites are a necessity for any business.
However, many elements come into play in the creation of a website. It can range from mere web design to ease of navigation. So, how do you measure your website’s performance in a sea of numerous businesses?
In digital marketing, there are many ways to analyze your website’s performance. Website traffic is among those options.
Although these metrics won’t explicitly paint a picture for you, it’s still important data that you have to put effort into analysing and deriving conclusions.
You can determine many aspects, such as website visits and conversion rates, by analysing website traffic. You can forecast the number of potential customers you can gain from the website visits alone.
In short, website traffic is an essential tool for your website and business! After all, consistently growing website traffic is an excellent indicator of website success.
But, it is important to define a few terms before we move on to explaining the importance of website traffic.
Conversion rate
What is a conversion rate? Conversion rate goes hand-in-hand with website traffic to determine the success of a website.
Your conversion rate measures the percentage of website visitors that have completed an intended “purpose” on your website. Let’s say your website allows visitors to make purchases.
If so, your conversion rate is the percentage of visitors that make purchases on the site.
After all, not all visitors that visit your website will 100% make a purchase.
To calculate the conversion rate, the formula is conversion rate = n total of conversions/n total of unique visitors*100. If a website had 50,000 visitors in a month, but only 3,000 users made a purchase, your conversion rate is 6%.
Therefore, it is important to understand that your website traffic is essential in analysing a website’s conversion rate.
The 5 Types of Traffic
Do you know that website traffic is more detailed than you think? In fact, 5 kinds of website traffic categorise traffic into common sources of website visits.
Your customers can come from various sources, such as search engines, ads, external links and even social media. Thus, website traffic is elevated further by dissecting website traffic into multiple categories for further analysis.
Business owners can understand the approaches they should leverage or improve on to increase positive website traffic.
1. Organic Traffic
Visitors that found your site through search engines are considered organic traffic. Although there are numerous results on the net, your website can utilise SEO strategies to rank better in visibility.
Let’s say your website specialises in Malaysian-based vegan cat food. Your website will appear as one of the top results through effective SEO.
2. Paid Traffic
Visitors that enter your site through ads or any promotional advertisement you paid for are considered paid traffic. Your paid media can come in the form of a pop-up, a link in a boosted social media post, and many more.
3. Direct Traffic
Familiar visitors who enter your website directly through a browser are considered direct traffic. Direct traffic tends to be familiar customers who are already well-versed with the brand.
Offline marketing strategies such as fliers and billboards can influence people to search your website.
4. Referral Traffic
Have you ever clicked on a link mentioned in a post or an article? Visitors that click on external links to access your website are considered referral traffic.
Therefore, referral traffic can be influenced through the use of links. You can increase the chances that a visitor will enter through more links in popular and credible sources.
5. Social Traffic
Most brands own social media accounts these days. Social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter are among the many choices for social media.
Social traffic is derived from website traffic that is gained through social media. It can be a link on a social media post or a social media ad.
3 Important Reasons to Observe Website Traffic
Now that you’re familiar with the nook and cranny of website traffic, you can move on to the benefits. After all, there is no doubt that website traffic plays an important role in digital marketing.
1. Getting a Full Picture of Your Traffic Source
Website traffic lets business owners understand where most of their traffic comes from. You may presume that your primary audience comes from organic traffic, but data will show you a complete picture.
You might realise most of your traffic comes from social traffic! As a business owner, it is important to understand your website’s strengths.
Let’s say you realise that social traffic is your website’s strongest point. It would be ideal for focusing marketing strategies to redirect users from your social media accounts to the website.
For example, social media posts can include more external links to the website. Adding more CTA buttons to redirect users will also potentially increase website traffic.
2. Monitoring Engagement Levels
A website’s conversion rate hinges highly on website traffic and the amount of engagement with the website’s purpose.
Although high website traffic is pleasing, it is vital to assess the percentage of visitors that engage with the website’s purpose- even if it’s low.
Whether your conversion rate is high or low, it can indicate what resonates with your visitors the most.
Maybe your brand has a new product ad, and you notice a decreased monthly conversion rate. You will get an idea that this new product may not resonate with consumers effectively.
3. Identifying Weaknesses
When business owners can analyse website traffic, they get the consumer’s point of view. By analysing your traffic sources and engagement, you can pinpoint presumed weaknesses.
Let’s say a website’s organic traffic is low. Then it would be safe to assume that the website has a low rank in search engine visibility.
Thus, the business owner can make changes to improve website SEO.
Website traffic also lets business owners understand the products, layouts, or UIs that don’t resonate with visitors through engagement levels.
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