Traffic
What is traffic?
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Definition of traffic
For SaaS organizations, traffic is a commonly used metric. It refers to how many visitors, or indeed individual visits, a website gets.
Because of this, you may also have heard of this referred to as website traffic.
However, whilst many businesses like to analyze how much traffic their website receives, it is not as useful a metric as some may believe — in fact, it is what Eric Ries (author of The Lean Startup) would call a vanity metric.
Traffic may tell you how many people come to your website each month, week or day, as a result of your marketing success, but it reveals little else. To truly gauge success, businesses should look at traffic rates compared to conversions or sales.
General FAQ
Which reports indicate how traffic arrived at a website?
If you’re using Google Analytics to track activity and measure performance, you can discover how traffic arrived at your website by clicking on the acquisition tab, followed by the channels tab, before (finally) clicking on the referral option.
This presents you with a user-friendly report that reveals how much traffic originates outside of its search engines, such as via social media and backlinks. The organic search report covers traffic reaching you from Google.
How to drive traffic to your website?
The first, and most obvious, step you can take to drive traffic to your website is to practice good SEO. Optimizing your site with efficient meta tags, images, copy, clear navigation, etc. increases its visibility to search engines and users.
Writing high-quality, high-value content goes hand-in-hand with effective SEO. Blog posts, whitepapers, guides, videos, and informative articles, with a healthy dose of keywords, will all help to bring traffic to your site. Other websites are more likely to create links to valuable content, too, sending more traffic your way.
It’s essential to put your content out there for prospects to see, though. Share every new piece of content you create across social media and encourage followers to engage with it. Invite them to share their feedback and discuss their response to it.
What are the typical traffic channels for websites?
Typical traffic channels for websites are organic search, referral, direct, and paid.
Organic search - traffic coming via search engines
Referral - traffic from other websites linked to yours
Direct - refers to users accessing the site by entering the URL into their browser or clicking on a bookmark
Paid - traffic which arrives through paid ads
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