Web Analytics: Organic & Social Traffic to Your Website

What is the next best thing to launching a brand new website? Seeing the first sign of new traffic! 

Traffic is the currency of digital marketing (that’s where we’re from!). You may be counting your success with visits or sessions…  every visitor in your web analytics is worth real money.

Before you ask your digital marketing agency for more traffic, let us get you ready to begin the conversation. Getting the traffic you deserve begins with knowing what kind of traffic your brand needs and how to get it.

Know the Traffic Channels

“I want more traffic to my website” is just a conversation starter. The traffic you see on your web analytics dashboard doesn’t automatically mean more customers, you have to provide quality to trigger conversion.

Here’s the most basic thing you need to know about traffic coming to your website.

Organic Traffic

Organic traffic is all of the unpaid visits from search engines like Google. “Unpaid” means you have not spent a dime on the ads to get the visits. Instead, you’ve published a lot of content, optimized it, given your SEO a good boost, and now you’re enjoying the first-class view from the 1st page of Google. Although Google is the most popular search engine today, with 4,464,000,000 searches per day, it’s not the only search engine out there. Bing, the second search engine in the world based on the daily searches (873,964,000) may have more value than you thought.

There are still many people who do their online searches on Internet Explorer, which together with Edge has an almost 10% of browser market share. 87% of Internet Explorer users search on Bing, so evaluating what SEO will work best for it isn’t a bad idea. Bing users in this category usually don’t have any other browsers installed on their computers, and like to keep things simple.

If your target fits into this group, maybe you should be looking at your rankings on Bing as well. 

Remember that organic traffic is always a good idea. It should be the first traffic channel on the list (exceptions are possible based on the brand and industry) and if you’ve done smart keyword research, leads coming from this channel will most likely be qualified.

Social Traffic

Social traffic encompasses all the visits that are generated from social media networks operating as referrals. As a rule, the list includes Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, Tumblr, Stumbleupon, Reddit, and so on. The list may vary depending on the web analytics tool you’re using.

Social traffic is hard to consider in integrity. Networks, where we use hashtags extensively, don’t always bring qualified traffic. For instance, while you can still get customers from Twitter, their percentage in your overall Twitter traffic won’t be big. Hashtags are topics and competition for visibility is harsh, so if users land on your website from Twitter, it doesn’t mean they are ready to purchase yet.

Despite that, don’t overlook those leads, you can still nurture them to become advocates. Even if they don’t buy, they might serve as good referrals.

Another aspect that needs consideration is the niche and the industry you belong to. Products that have a powerful visual representation do extremely well on Pinterest and Instagram. Seeing one of the pools your company made may turn a user into a lead better than a 1000-word detailed article.

As for companies delivering business solutions, LinkedIn is still the best place, where you need to have your own “booth” and publish awesome content regularly.

Ready to wrap up? 

Check back for our next article, where we’ll take a look at other traffic channels like referral, email, paid, direct, and display.

Knowing the value in the kind of traffic your website gets or might get is more important than the traffic itself. Qualified traffic may not look good in numbers in your next web analytics report, but it will surely look good for your business growth. If you’re a marketing manager who’s having a hard time explaining the importance of quality to your boss, shoot us an email … that’s a task we’re really good at!

Here’s the best way to reach us, schedule a free consultation and our experts will get back to you as soon as we can.