Monitor these types of traffic in Google Analytics for a better understanding of your marketing.
Google Analytics is a powerful tool, granting you access to hundreds of metrics about your website, from the number of people who visit to the typical patterns of behavior of visitors. To make things even better, it’s completely free.
But if you’re new to GA, you might not be sure which metrics are most important to measure. Metrics like customer behavior and conversion rates can tell you a lot about your website, but if you’re interested in marketing and advertising, you might be even more interested in tracking traffic.
There are 5 main types of traffic you’ll want to evaluate, including:
- Direct traffic. Direct traffic is measured whenever someone types your URL into their web browser, or clicks on a bookmark. The easiest way to increase this portion of traffic is to make a good impression on people and improve brand awareness. It’s not ideal for generating new traffic, but it’s perfect for repeat visitors.
- Organic traffic. Organic traffic is what you’ll measure if you want to evaluate the success of your search engine optimization (SEO) campaign. SEO is all about climbing the rankings in search engine results pages (SERPs), and organic traffic counts everyone who finds your website through SERPs.
- Referral traffic. You may also want to look at referral traffic, the number of people who click external links to visit your site. This is especially valuable if you’re using a guest posting and link building strategy.
- Social traffic. If you spend a lot of time on social media marketing, you’ll also want to watch your social traffic—the number of people visiting your website from popular social media sites. You can even see a breakdown by platform here!
- Paid traffic. Finally, consider paid traffic. You’ll only see this segment if you’re using pay per click (PPC) advertising, but it’s worth considering as a fraction of the whole.
Are you interested in improving your online marketing and advertising strategy? Contact Quez Media today for a free consultation!
