The traffic that you receive tour blog or website can be categorized into four unique categories. All four traffic types bring a slightly different audience to your site with different wants and needs from their experience. It’s vitally important to use your Analytics tools to measure the effect of these sources so you can customize and optimize content and navigation to their highest levels.
Direct Traffic – this includes when people actually type in your URL into their browser as well as traffic that comes from bookmarks. Because their are many sources of entry, this type of traffic is usually quite valuable, but also very hard to trace.
Referral Traffic – when a user clicks on a link to your site from another site, this is what’s known as referral traffic. Since inbound links play a very large role in the clout that your site receives from the search engines, having active referral traffic is important on multiple levels.
Search Traffic – organic search traffic is driven directly from search engines and is broadly based on the actual content on your blog or website. Paid traffic means that you’ve paid for ads on a service such as Google AdWords and the resulting traffic that is driven from that network.
Social Media Traffic – this includes visitors that reach your site directly from a blog, social network, bookmarking site, photo or video sharing site, message board or forum. This type of traffic behaves a little differently than the other three sources primarily since it is derived from a communication environment instead of a traditional online research or information seeking environment. However, social media traffic is exceptionally important and is a great catalyst for building a relationship to your site.