Internet traffic is nothing but the sum of all visitors to a web resource. To date, everything is arranged in such a way that traffic is the key to the profitability of the project. Different traffic can bring different money, but one thing is the same: you always need more of it than you have at the moment. We will try to cover the topic of traffic in as much detail as possible, answering all the main questions that beginner webmasters have about traffic.
Traffic sources
Traffic cannot be created out of nothing, just like you cannot just take and print money. Visitors need to be attracted from other, larger sources that have already won their own audience. Let's find out what traffic sources exist today:
- search engines;
- social networks;
- mobile messengers;
- browser bookmarks;
- portals and forums;
- offline advertising;
- online advertising;
- other sources.
It is noteworthy that you need to decide on a way to further monetize your project on the Internet in order to choose the necessary traffic growth strategy. If you plan to make money from sales, then any source of traffic, including advertising, is fine for you. But for content platforms, this is not profitable, because their business model involves making money on the sale of advertising, and reselling traffic at a higher price is a completely different story. Therefore, we will first look at free traffic sources.
How to get visitors for free
The Internet user can go from one web resource to another using the found link or using a search engine. Both options offer an abundance of free ways to get traffic. Below we will give basic examples of getting traffic from the largest sources:
- Search engines. To get to the top of search results, the easiest way is to choose a special semantic core of search queries. For these requests, it will be necessary to write articles that will target a specific keyword.
- Social like "Vkontakte" and "Facebook" allow you to create public interest groups. By filling these groups with interesting content and leaving a link to it in other publics, you can gain subscribers who can then be turned into an audience for your portal.
- Messengers for mobile devices support the chatbot function. You can create some kind of bot with unusual answers, and people will send each other links to it. So youget an audience that can then be converted into traffic to your resource.
- If you already have high traffic numbers from various sources, work on getting people to bookmark your site and visit it regularly.
- Portals of interest, like "Peekaboo" or "Habrahabr", have a fairly solvent audience. If you establish yourself there, you can discreetly advertise your site or product.
- People still go out and look at billboards. This method of advertising works well on a large scale advertising budget.
- Online advertising has many varieties, and it is better to entrust it to a professional, explaining your goals and objectives in detail.
New traffic sources
A new source of traffic for your portal can be, for example, traffic from mobile applications.
Visitors for an online store can be attracted using utilities like "Yandex. Market", which show the user the stores with the lowest prices. If you don't want or can't reduce prices, just change the number on the site, and when communicating with the client by phone, try to explain to him that the price is slightly higher than indicated on the site. Many customers do not want to look for a store again and agree to the purchase. You can also use upselling (upselling) for clients from such utilities.
News aggregators, though old as the world, but many webmasters still underestimate their importance. If you add your newsfeed to a sufficient number of aggregators, then you can get most of the traffic only from them. After all, people want to read the news in one place, and not surf the Internet looking for a little note.
Contextual advertising
In some commercial niches, there is almost no hope of breaking into the top search results, so contextual advertising becomes an uncompromising option. Setting the context is an art for those who do it. It is necessary to sort through huge lists of keywords, filtering the necessary ones into the white list, and pick up negative keywords. Then you need to target the audience, select promotional materials, conduct tests, and much more. In a word, it is better to delegate an advertising campaign to a knowledgeable person, or better to an advertising agency. After all, then you will have a constant connection with the performer and the confidence that tomorrow the traffic channel will not be blocked, and you will continue to receive the necessary volumes of visitors to the site.
Teaser advertising and targeting in social networks also have a similar system of work. If you want to get customers or traffic profitably, be prepared to work on the parameters of your advertising campaign.
How to find out a competitor's traffic sources
The easiest to understand and popular service is Similarweb.com
This service allows you to find out the approximate volume of the monthly audience, traffic affiliation by country and traffic source, referrals and social involvement. "Similarweb" is useful fora rough estimate of a competitor, but his numbers tend to be quite inaccurate. You can check this by analyzing your website with it.
Sometimes on the site you can find a Live Internet statistics counter that is not password protected. In this case, you can view the statistics of such a resource without any problems. But such luck comes across very rarely, because no one wants to show the keywords and pages to which they receive the maximum traffic.
The following services can also help with the task of learning more about the sources of other people's traffic:
- Alexa.com;
- Compete.com;
- Semrush.com;
- Quantcast.com.
In addition to these standard services, there is a chance that the site you are interested in is now being sold to the Telderi.ru site exchange. Then you can just write to the seller and get all the necessary statistics without the obligation to buy.
How to analyze received traffic
In order not to invent a wheel, try Yandex. Metrica statistics services, or you can use Google Analytics as a service for analyzing traffic sources. Both tools are quite powerful and allow you to track complex targets, set utm tags, and more.
"Yandex. Metrica" has a more user-friendly interface, which allows the site owner to independently deal with the necessary statistics, make a slice of data, report on certain dates and indicators, etc. But the service from Google is more integrated with your contextual advertising Ad Words.
Target traffic source
Google Analytics statistics service provides goal setting functionality. The goal in this sense can be any action aimed at achieving conversion. This can be placing an order, registering on the site, making a repost, and so on. Properly chosen goals allow you to adequately evaluate the statistics in the future and get a truly representative sample, without setting up a system of goals it is difficult to talk about a correct assessment of the effectiveness of an Internet business.
Goals are implemented at the presentation level and can be defined as screens or pages viewed by visitors, or a certain number of them. The goal may have a monetary value. In this case, the conversion rate will be disaggregated by the value of each conversion, which will allow you to pay attention to the really important types. This can be, for example, the maximum or minimum transaction amount on the site.
There are 5 types of goals, which we list below in the table.
How to set goals in Google Analytics
To add a new goal to Google Analytics, you need to go to the admin panel, then the goal section - "Add goal". Next, follow the instructions:
- Specify the name and type. The goal can be, for example, the page that will open in the browser after placing a purchase order, or subscribing to an email newsletter.
- You must specify the URL of the target page. Whenneed, you can assign the path to the target action and the value of this conversion.
- Create a target.
You can view reports on achieved goals and conversion efficiency in the "Conversions" section by selecting the "Goals" sub-item there. Here we will find information about the goals achieved and the conversion rate, and information about the value of the goals in monetary terms will also be available. Menu "Map Goals" provide you with data in graphical form.
The "Traffic Sources - Ad Words" section allows you to track the effectiveness of advertising by ad groups, campaigns, keywords, search queries.
Direct calls
Direct traffic source raises a lot of questions among users of statistics from Google. The word direct in translation from English means "direct", in the context of attendance, this is a visitor who directly went to your site, that is, from bookmarks.
Direct hits can be a fairly accurate indicator of the quality of a resource's offline ads, provided you use them. If not, then even better, then these are your deserved regular readers.
Analysis of traffic sources
Traffic source analysis implies working closely with Google Analytics.
This is a report that is often used in analysis. Open it by selecting "Traffic sources" in the menu, and then select "All traffic". The first thing that catches your eye is the graph of the total number of transitions,distributed by day, as well as information about sources.
For a detailed analysis, click on the source, selecting it from the general list. Now you will be able to analyze in detail a particular traffic source to study things that are not visible on the overall graph. Let's use the filter by an additional parameter.
Next, you can configure the parameters as you like, test various statistical hypotheses, confirm and reject them.
Don't risk your money
Statistics is an independent scientific discipline that has many pitfalls, when intuitively clear things should in fact be interpreted differently than it seems to us. Therefore, the more money you spend on paid traffic channels, the more you risk misinterpreting the data of the statistical sample. Therefore, it is better to outsource such activities to professionals.
