Internet traffic is nothing but the sum of all visitors to a web resource. Today, everything is arranged so that traffic is the key to project profitability. Different traffic can bring different money, but one thing is the same: it always needs more than there is at the moment. We will try to cover the topic of attendance in as much detail as possible, answering all the basic questions that arise for beginner webmasters about traffic.
Traffic sources
Traffic cannot be created from nothing, just like money cannot be simply printed and printed. 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;
- Bookmarks in the browser
- portals and forums;
- offline advertising;
- online advertising;
- other sources.
It is noteworthy that you need to decide on the way to further monetize your project on the Internet in order to choose the necessary strategy for increasing traffic. If you plan to make money on sales, then any source of traffic, including advertising, is suitable for you. But for content sites, this is not profitable, because their business model involves earning from the sale of advertising, and reselling traffic at a higher price is another story altogether. Therefore, for starters, we will consider free traffic sources.
How to get visitors for free
A user of the Internet 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. Next, we give basic examples of receiving traffic from the largest sources:
- Search Engines. To get into the top of search results it is easiest to choose a special semantic core of search queries. Under these requests, it will be necessary to write articles that will be targeted at a specific keyword.
- Social networks like VKontakte and Facebook allow you to create public interest groups. Filling these groups with interesting content and leaving a link to it in other public places, you can gain subscribers who can then be turned into the audience of your portal.
- Messengers for mobile devices support the chatbots feature. You can create some kind of bot with unusual answers, and people will throw off links to it to each other. So you get an audience, which can then be converted into traffic to your resource.
- If you already have high traffic values from various sources, make sure that people bookmark your site and visit it regularly.
- Interest portals like Picabu or Habrahabr have a fairly solvent audience. If you prove yourself there, you can quietly advertise your site or product.
- People still go out and look at the 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 in detail their goals and objectives.
New traffic sources
For example, traffic from mobile applications can become a new source of traffic for your portal.
Visitors to the online store can be attracted with utilities like Yandex.Market, which show the user the stores with the lowest prices. If you do not want, or cannot 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 the one indicated on the site. Many customers do not want to search the store again and agree to purchase. You can also use after-sales (upsells) for customers from such utilities.
News aggregators are as old as the world, but many webmasters still underestimate their value. If you add your newsletter 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 run around the Internet in search of a small note.
contextual advertising
In some commercial niches, there is almost no hope of breaking into the top of search results, so contextual advertising is becoming an uncompromising option. Setting context is a whole art for those who do this. It is necessary to sort through huge lists of keywords, filtering the necessary ones into a white list, and select 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, but better to an advertising agency. After all, then you will have constant communication with the contractor and confidence that tomorrow the traffic channel will not be closed, and you will continue to receive the necessary volumes of visitors to the site.
A similar system of work also has teaser advertising and targeting on social networks. If you want to receive customers or traffic profitably - be prepared to work on the parameters of the advertising campaign.
How to find out competitor traffic sources
The easiest to understand and popular service is Similarweb.com
This service allows you to find out the approximate volume of a monthly audience, traffic affiliation by country and source of traffic, referral referrals and social involvement. “Similarveb” is useful for a rough estimation of the competitor, but its numbers, as a rule, are very inaccurate. You can verify this by analyzing your website with it.
Sometimes on the site you can find a Live Internet statistics counter that is not hidden by a password. In this case, you can view the statistics of such a resource without any problems. But such luck is very rare, because no one wants to shine keywords and pages that receive maximum traffic.
The following services can also help with the task of learning more about 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 being sold to Telderi.ru sites exchange. Then you can simply write to the seller and get all the necessary statistics data without the obligation to buy.
How to analyze received traffic
In order not to come up with a bicycle, try the Yandex.Metrica statistics services, or you can use Google Analytics as a traffic analysis source. Both tools are powerful enough and allow you to track complex goals, set utm-tags and more.
Yandex.Metrica has a user-friendly interface, which allows the site owner to independently figure out the necessary statistics, make a data slice, report on specific dates and indicators, etc. But the service from Google is more integrated with its contextual advertising Ad Words.
Target Traffic Source
The Google Analytics statistics service provides goal setting functionality. The goal in this understanding can be any action aimed at achieving conversion. This may be placing an order, registering on a site, reposting and so on. Correctly chosen goals allow in the future to adequately evaluate statistics and get a truly representative sample, without setting up a goal system it is difficult to talk about a correct assessment of the effectiveness of 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 target may have a cash equivalent. In this case, the conversion rate will be detailed by the value of each conversion, which will allow you to pay attention to really important types. This may be, for example, the maximum or minimum transaction amount on the site.
There are 5 types of goals that we list in the table below.
How to set up 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:
- Indicate the name and type. The goal can be specified, for example, the page that opens in the browser after placing a purchase order, or subscribing to an email newsletter.
- You must provide the URL of the goal page. If necessary, you can assign a path to the target action and the value of this conversion.
- Create a goal.
You can view reports on goals achieved 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 on the value of goals in monetary terms will also be available. The Goal Map menu provides you with graphical data.
The "Traffic Sources - Ad Words" section allows you to track the effectiveness of advertising by ad groups, campaigns, keywords, search queries.
Direct calls
The direct traffic source raises a lot of questions among users of statistics from Google. The word direct in English means “direct”, in the context of traffic it is a visitor who directly visited your site, that is, from bookmarks.
The direct hits rate can fairly accurately reflect the quality of the resource’s advertising offline, provided that you use it. If not, then even better, then these are your honored regular readers.
Analysis of traffic sources
Analysis of the traffic source implies a tight work with Google Analytics.
It will be a report that is often used in the analysis. We’ll 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 the sources.
For a detailed analysis, click on the source, selecting it from the general list. Now you can analyze in detail a separate source of traffic in order to study things that are not noticeable on the general graph. We use the filter by an additional parameter.
Then you can configure the parameters as you like, check various statistical hypotheses, confirm and reject them.
Do not risk money
Statistics is an independent scientific discipline, which has many pitfalls when intuitive things should in fact be interpreted differently than it seems to us. Therefore, the more money you spend on paid traffic channels, the greater the risk of misinterpreting the data of the statistical sample. Therefore, it is better to outsource such activities to professionals.