Traditionally, traffic sources are divided into 4 large families:
1. Paid media: bringing together paid traffic sources (Google Adwords, Facebook Ads, etc.)
2. Owned media: traffic generated thanks to the assets of your site (blog, content, videos…)
3. Shared media: the audience resulting from sharing on social networks and word of mouth
4. Earned media: the visibility acquired through your press relations, bloggers or influencers…
This model works fine but I prefer to use a different typology to talk specifically about the sources of Internet traffic:
1. Brand awareness traffic: Brings together sources of traffic related to your or your business influence, from media mentions to word-of-mouth and referrals. A quality source close to the action and which grows over time.
2. Free traffic: brings together free sources ranging from inbound links to your site to SEO, and social media shares a source of traffic that requires time, effort, and creativity but also lasting.
3. Paid traffic: brings together the paid sources of advertising to affiliate through paid partnerships. A source of traffic that can be quickly activated and scaled according to your profitability.
4. Traffic linked to: brings your subscribers together engaged visitors to your site who, by subscribing to your email list, a Chatbot, or notifications, have taken one step closer to your end goal. This is an audience to work specifically to convert more often (in registrants, in contacts, in sales…).
Why a different typology: simply because the origin of your traffic is a good indicator of the level of maturity of your visitor (or prospect). Each source of traffic has its uses but should be acted upon depending on the level where you want to act to get results.
So to jump straight to the traffic sources based on this categorization, here are the shortcuts:
1. The sources of traffic related to notoriety
2. The sources of free traffic
3. The sources of paid traffic
4. The sources of traffic related to your subscribers
The sources of traffic linked to notoriety
1. Notoriety: Notoriety is your ability to be part of the answers that come to mind when your visitors have a need. Example: a user wanting to check information on the “Hundred Years War” will probably type Wikipedia into Google. Which sites are your users looking for primarily when looking for a service or information like that on your site?
Effectiveness: Notoriety is a source of excellent quality traffic insofar as it returns visitors to your site who are already mature compared to what they think they will find with you. Increasing your notoriety is a long-term objective, and the traffic resulting from your notoriety is the result of all your cross actions: advertising campaigns, press relations, content strategy, social networks…
2. Influence: Influence is the ability of your publications, studies, and speeches (on your site or on third-party platforms such as social networks) to generate an action or an impact with your audience.
Effectiveness: The effectiveness of your influence is measured by the size of the audience you are able to reach and your ability to take that audience into action (through interaction, comment, sharing, or better still a subscription, a purchase, a first contact …). Your influence is the addition and the result of the recurrence and continuity of your marketing actions.
3. Direct traffic: Direct traffic is obtained from the audience to your site coming from visitors who either:
- Know the name of your site, company or brand and who typed it in their browser bar
- Know the URL of your website (therefore its exact address) and who typed it in the bar of their browser
- Bookmarked your website and came back to your site through it
Effectiveness: Direct traffic is an excellent quality audience; the direct result of increasing your notoriety, your influence, and word-of-mouth.
4. The recommendation: The recommendation (“referral” in English) covers all the strategies aimed at organizing word of mouth. As the notoriety of your site grows, you obviously benefit from a critical mass effect. Your marketing actions are starting to grow together, your campaigns are working better, your communities are growing, your content is shared more often, your visitors or your satisfied customers recommend you and attract new people, creating a virtuous phenomenon.
You can encourage these “viral loops” by:
- Encouraging sharing on social networks
- Rewarding your best users or customers by highlighting them or offering a gift, a coupon…
- Gamifying the recommendation experience by awarding points, levels, bonuses
- Paying for the recommendation through an affiliate program (example: 10 or 20% commission)
- Recruiting paid “brand ambassadors” to spread the good word
Efficiency: The traffic resulting from the recommendation is of excellent quality. Watching your visitors or customers speak highly of your site or product is much more effective than claiming the benefits on your own. The effectiveness and virility of a “recommendation” program depend on the number of people solicited, and the perceived value of your incentive (a gift keychain will generate less traffic than free coaching, 3 months offered on a tool fee or a -50% coupon).
See the inbound marketing guide
Check out the tutorial to make inbound marketing
1. Content marketing: Content marketing (or content marketing) is a component of inbound marketing and brings together all the traffic creation strategies based on the creation of content, allowing to benefit from free visibility on the search engines. Research and social networks:
- Text content: expert content, business cases, studies, stories…
- Visual content: photos, animated gifs, drawings, computer graphics, diagrams, quotes, etc.
- Sound content: podcasts, music…
- Video content: tutorials, testimonials, webinars…
- Live content: live videos…
- Stories
- Competition…
- User-generated content
Effectiveness: The effectiveness of content marketing depends on the platform chosen. The trend of the big players (Google, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn…) goes in the direction of an ever weaker part of free visibility in favor of paid visibility. Concretely, this means that sponsored content as part of Google or Facebook campaigns is taking up more and more space in search results and in news feeds. At the same time, emerging on these dominant platforms requires engaging, relevant, and quality content in order to be able to emerge in the face of the competition and not be buried by algorithms. It is, therefore, sometimes interesting to focus on emerging platforms where competition is less.
Beyond this observation, content marketing remains one of the most effective sources of driving traffic to your website. It is certainly a slow source to grow, especially if you are just starting out, without an email list or community, but which then tends to increase exponentially. There are some of the best companies that can do Web Development in Pakistan.
Check out the content marketing guide
Check out the tutorial on how to do content marketing
4. Video Marketing: Video marketing is a sub-branch of content marketing. As its name advises, it focuses on the production of video content (tutorials, testimonials, webinars, video advertisements, live videos, live on social networks, etc.).
Effectiveness: Video allows both to enrich the text content of your site and to be present on third-party platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, or LinkedIn. While it does not directly create traffic to your site (although it is often possible indirectly to redirect part of the audience through links in your video descriptions or in the messages accompanying the publication of your videos), the video allows to give your business a face, increase your awareness and engage your community. The impact of your videos depends on the recurrence to which you produce your content and the size of the affected audience.
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