Types of Website Traffic and How to Manage?

Nowadays, many people choose blogging as a profession. They create websites ultimately to earn money through advertising and affiliate marketing. However, the success of your advertising revenue relies on number of clicks generated from real users. This needs a lot of traffic to your site which can increase the possibility of generating revenue from advertising or affiliate sales commission. Without traffic it does not make sense for the advertisers to display ads on your site. If you are creating site for advertising revenue, it is necessary for you to understand how to manage your website traffic from the beginning.

Types of Website Traffic?

You can generally classify, website traffic into four main categories as below:

1. Organic Traffic
2. Paid Traffic through Ad Campaigns
3. Referral Traffic
4. Social Traffic

1. Organic Traffic from Search Engines

Organic traffic indicates visitors viewing your website from search engines result pages. Traffic from the search engines is considered as a quality traffic to your site, since it is not intentionally generated by the site owner. We highly recommend to target the traffic from various leading search engines like Google, Bing, Yandex and Baidu. It may take few years of time to have an established website. However, organic traffic will send thousands of free visitors across the globe to your site.

• The easy way to get organic traffic from search engines is to use search engine optimization techniques.
• SEO will help to improve your site ranking in search results page and get good amount of quality traffic to your site.
• You can submit your site to search engines like Google, Bing, Baidu and Yandex and start monitoring your site performance using Webmaster Tools to optimize your website structure and search engine friendliness. 
• In addition, you can also submit your site to best free web directories.

Remember, you need to optimize every part of your page like page titles, meta description and URL structure for appearing top in the search engine results page.

Related: Learn more about SEO basics.

In addition to organic traffic, you can also target to get direct traffic to your website. The major source of direct traffic is from bookmarks and simple to remember domain name. In general direct traffic is also considered as organic traffic since the users open your site on their own. For example, mostly users will open Google or Microsoft sites directly in the browser by typing the address rather than searching it through search engines. In fact, all top websites in the world have strong brand names to drive direct traffic.

2. Paid Advertising

Paid Advertising like Google AdWords, Bing Ads and Facebook helps you to get geo-targeted ads on cost per click basis. You can also use click to call option to pay only when a customer calls you through the ad you displayed. Paid advertising is essentially the same as getting traffic from search engines as discussed above with the additional option to display your ads in their partner content network sites.

The important part is to monitor your traffic and find out the least performing page in your site and optimize it for better performance. Learn more about paid advertising here.

3. Referral Traffic

Referral traffic is the intentional traffic created by the site owner using free traffic exchange programs or reciprocal links. It is not recommended to use any of the free traffic exchange programs since the traffic through these exchanges are not from the quality sources. If you are using AdSense then any means of traffic through free traffic exchange programs will lead to banning of your AdSense account for life time.

The other kind of referral traffic is creating reciprocal link with another site owner and generating traffic through other site. Search engines considers one way links for calculating the top position and the reciprocal links are considered as a spam. If you use reciprocal links as a primary source for traffic, sooner or later search engines will penalize your site by marking it for manual spam. This will lead to removing your site completely from the search engine results page.

4. Social Traffic

Nowadays bringing traffic to your site is no more a difficult task with the help of social networking sites. The simple option is to choose a few social networking sites where you have many friends and link your website to your profile. You can authorize those social sites like Facebook and Twitter to connect each other and share the content on all the sites with single click. For example, you can select Pinterest and connect your Pinterest account to Twitter and Facebook. This makes your task simple by pinning a single image in Pinterest will auto tweet in your Twitter account and then auto post in your Facebook Page’s timeline.

Site promotion also becomes easy with creating a free Facebook fan Page, Yahoo! group or company page in LinkedIn. Another simple way is to start a blog with Tumblr or any popular blogging service in your country (for example Sina Weibo is a famous microblogging platform in China) and start sharing interested topics from your main site.

Ensuring Proper Traffic Ratio

Now you know various sources of website traffic. It is always a good idea to combine organic, paid and social traffic methods to boost traffic to your site. Webmasters can use tools like Google Analytics to monitor various sources of traffic to their site. In order to maintain a good publisher account status with advertisers, you need to rely on search engine traffic compared to social or referral traffic.

In general, ensure the traffic ratio from various sources does not exceed the following guidelines:

If you are not using any paid ad campaigns or social traffic then search engine / direct traffic should be 90% and the referral traffic shall be of 10%.