When it comes to online marketing it is important to understand the different types of visitors you can have. This will allow you to see what marketing avenues are working and which are not.
In internet marketing you may have heard the term traffic sources, this relates to how a visitor has come to find your website. There are many different forms of traffic but the main ones are referrals, direct, organic and paid for. Below is a quick overview of what they all mean:
Organic – An organic visit is counted when someone finds you via one of the search engine search results such as Bing, Google or Yahoo.
Referrals – this is the number of visits to your website that have come through another site. This may be a link that you have on another site to yours, this may or may not include social visits.
Social – This is referrals from Facebook, Twitter, Linked In for example. These may also be included in the referral figure.
Direct – this is the number of people that have come to your site by typing your address directly in to the address bar. Often these are repeat visitors or ones that have got your address off a business card, signage or maybe by calling you first.
Paid or PPC – Paid for traffic is when someone has clicked on a link and the business gets charged a fee for this.