Traffic Sources

What are the Web Traffic Sources in Marketing?

“Web traffic source” is any online place that is sending traffic to your company’s website. Online traffic is the number of users that visit a website. The term “traffic” comes from the concept of “store traffic”.

Traditionally, store managers and marketers have been using this metric to measure the total number of customers who visit their store in a given time period. It, also, includes customers that did not make a purchase.

Similarly, in digital marketing website traffic is the total number of users who visit your website in a certain period of time. In contrast to store traffic, the source of website traffic can be measured quite accurately.

By understanding the source of website traffic, marketers gain valuable insights into which activities, third-parties or strategies help them to gain visitors. Also, each traffic source communicates something about the intention of the visitor.

For example, users coming from a very specific Google Search are more likely to buy than visitors who come from an awareness ad. In the first case, users already know the product or the company, while in the second they may see the brand for the first time. As a result, Google search belongs to the bottom of the funnel, while an awareness ad to the top of the funnel marketing.

Google Analytics is the most popular tool to measure traffic sources. As a result, Google is the entity that has almost determined their taxonomy and how they are being defined in 2022.

The most relevant sources to understand are: direct, referral and both paid and organic search. Here, we should mention the biggest misconception about direct traffic. It includes users who directly visited your website through their browser URL bars, as well as the traffic sources which Google was not able to index.

Other traffic sources that can be found in a typical mature online marketing Google Analytics account are: email, social media, affiliates, online video, display (dbm).

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