Traffic describes the number of visitors a website receives within a given period. It covers everyone who opens a page, no matter whether they arrive through Google, social media, advertising, email or by typing the address directly.
Traffic is one of the most important metrics in online marketing because it shows how visible and how relevant a website is.
What types of traffic are there?
Visitors come from different sources, so traffic is usually broken into categories:
- organic traffic from search engines
- paid traffic from advertising
- direct traffic from people entering the URL
- social traffic from social media
- referral traffic from other websites
Why traffic alone says little
A high visitor count is worth nothing if the visitors are not the right ones. What matters is whether they match what you offer and whether they take an action: an enquiry, a booking, a purchase.
That is why traffic should always be read alongside conversions and revenue rather than on its own.