Traffic Source: Explained Simply | Brafton

Attracting more traffic to your company’s website, and to your digital resources in general, is a common digital marketing goal. All the materials you’ve worked so hard to build won’t do you any good unless people are actively looking at them.

To get serious about digital marketing and drive traffic numbers up, you need to know where your visitors are coming from. Unless you can attribute traffic to its sources, you’ll struggle to understand which marketing methods give you the most value for your money, which need extra attention and which are simply wrong for your business.

A solid campaign to increase brand awareness, conversions, reputation or any other key metric is built on strong data. This includes traffic source attribution information.

What Are Possible Website Traffic Sources?

Website traffic is a measurement of the users who look at and engage with your online resources. Traffic sources represent where those users come from. What is it that draws people to your site? Getting solid information about these facts can help you tune up every part of your marketing strategy.

A few of the different traffic sources you’ll encounter include:

• Direct web traffic: This means someone typing the address of your website into their web browser and going there. Direct traffic is tricky to include in a digital marketing strategy because it’s difficult to determine where exactly a particular customer learned about your website before they navigated there.
• Social media traffic: In an era when virtually every brand is active on multiple social media platforms, it’s natural to put a high priority on social traffic. This is a blanket term covering all sorts of links from social posts. Consumers clicking through from posts on X (formerly Twitter), Instagram or LinkedIn are providing social media traffic.
• Organic traffic (search traffic): Search engine optimization (SEO) efforts are designed to generate this kind of website traffic. It means someone clicking on a result on a search engine results page (SERP). The more you optimize your blog posts and landing pages, the higher they’ll rank on SERPs, positioning them well to produce organic traffic.
• Paid search traffic: The other side of the search traffic coin, this means clicks generated by paid ads that run on SERPs. With search engines like Google giving over large portions of their pages to ad space, buying paid promotion is a legitimate way to promote your website. Paid traffic on Google Ad spaces and elsewhere is a complement to organic traffic, rather than a replacement for it.
• Referral traffic: When visitors from one website go right to another, that’s referral traffic. This type of traffic typically comes from posts relevant to your brand that appear on third-party sites. Contributing guest articles to industry journals, exchanging blog posts with a friendly company and setting up directory profiles are likely ways to generate referral traffic. Affiliate marketing can also contribute to this source.
• Email traffic: This means web traffic that comes from links in emails. Whether your primary email strategy involves a regular newsletter, targeted marketing email blasts or both, you can use high-quality messages to stoke interest in your site. Getting sign-ups for an email list can help you keep driving traffic from a targeted customer base over time.

Becoming familiar with all these sources, and their relative importance to your brand, is an essential part of planning your marketing strategy. Some companies’ digital marketing will revolve around social media posts, while others will be driven largely by SEO marketing or paid search.

Whether you’re working with a marketing agency or an internal department, your plan should account for which traffic sources deserve the most focus, budget and attention. Optimizing your costs and time investment means targeting the ones that matter and letting others go.

What Are the Benefits of Attributing Website Traffic Sources?

“Is it working?” That’s the key question at the root of all intelligent adjustments to marketing campaigns. Unless you can determine how well your current efforts are functioning, it’s hard to know your next move.

Marketing at its best is a science, with all the precision and experimentation that entails. This means you have to apply the scientific method and collect ample data that will guide your efforts.

Whether the results of your traffic attribution efforts are promising or disappointing, knowledge is power. Committing to digital marketing means spending money, and you deserve to know whether that money is having the intended effect and whether you’re winning search traffic for your brand in the best or most efficient way.

Interpreting Web Traffic Success (and Failure)

If a particular channel is producing a satisfactory amount of web traffic, that’s valuable confirmation that your budget has been well spent. It’s also a useful data point about your customers that will help you plan future marketing efforts. When the data reveals the opposite — that you’re not seeing much traffic from a specific channel, that information can be even more important.

A lack of adequate traffic is something you can take action to reverse. For example, if SEO content isn’t attracting clicks, you can diagnose potential issues with the material or try a new format to boost your “free” site traffic. Perhaps the article needs re-optimization to land higher on the SERP. Maybe the headline or meta description isn’t enticing enough. In some cases, you may even realize you’re targeting a search term that isn’t relevant to your audience.

The more granular your traffic attribution can become, the more you can do with it. If you don’t just focus on organic traffic in general but get into the details of which blog posts are performing best, you can create a clear profile of your audience. That knowledge lets you keep serving customers content that will drive increasingly positive results.

How Do Leading Methods Help You Attribute Website Traffic?

You can use a variety of digital marketing platforms to attribute web traffic. Fortunately for your marketing budget, however, you don’t have to invest in obscure, complex or pricey technology. Rather, there are attribution dashboards included in the industry-standard tools you may already be using, namely Google Analytics and Google Search Console.

Simple features in these marketing platforms can give you a zoomed-in look at your traffic sources. For instance, it’s possible to use Google Search Console to break down SEO traffic by specific search terms, then see which blog posts or landing pages on your site are attracting the users who enter that search query.

Your choice of tool will differ depending on what type of traffic attribution you’re performing. While Google Search Console is a good choice for organic traffic, measuring the results of a pay-per-click campaign or other paid marketing effort is a job for Google Analytics or your paid advertising platform, which allows you to see how your site performed regarding each of your targeted keywords during a specific period of time.

Standard Tools Help You Track Complex Traffic

Some forms of traffic are less straightforward than organic or paid search traffic. Social traffic, for instance, can be difficult to measure and comprehend. Google Analytics can assist with this process, however. By building custom campaigns in Google Analytics, you can generate unique codes that will allow you to follow the results of specific social media platform campaigns.

Rather than ever giving up and deciding not to bother tracking a specific type of web traffic, you can always put together a solution. Extra effort during the early stages of a campaign can help you optimize your efforts going forward; this, in turn, can keep you competitive with other brands in your space. Understanding how multiple traffic sources come together helps you build out more powerful campaigns in the future.

Build a Stronger Digital Marketing Strategy by Attributing Traffic Effectively

Traffic attribution isn’t an end unto itself. It’s a source of fuel for your marketing campaigns. Building a digital marketing campaign means taking a big-picture view, determining your objectives, targeting your audience and selecting methods that will achieve that goal.

Traffic attribution fits into marketing strategy creation at a few stages. At the outset of a new strategy, it’s valuable to know which channels have been successful for you in the past. Throughout your campaign, you can benefit from seeing how actual performance is stacking up to expectations. After a discrete period, you can then look back at your traffic acquisition report and make adjustments for your next big effort.

If you choose to work with a third-party marketing agency, this partner can assist with the technical sides of your digital marketing strategy, interpreting traffic source attribution metrics among them. On the other hand, if you run your campaigns entirely through an internal marketing department, your own personnel can take the reins of Google Search Console and Google Analytics.

No matter who takes the reins on your marketing strategy, the one thing you shouldn’t do is neglect to attribute your web traffic sources. Lack of visibility can leave you without all the information you need to master your traffic acquisition efforts.