The biggest determining factor in whether a website will be successful is the amount of traffic it receives. While there is no guarantee for success with just any type of traffic, a website’s lifeblood revolves around people (who are interested) seeing your content, products, services or whatever else you offer. With more tools than ever before that allow webmasters, bloggers and businesses to keep tabs on who is visiting, you have no excuse to not be aware of how your website is performing. Today, we’ll discuss three different types of traffic that you absolutely should be monitoring and analysing in Google Analytics in order to stay on top.

Organic/Search Traffic

Keeping track of organic traffic is an immensely valuable thing to do, as it tells you how well your website is doing with search engines. Organic traffic will vary from month to month, but the overall trend over months and years will shed light on just how effective your SEO strategies are. When pinging for SEO, the primary goal is to increase traffic from relevant sources and ensure that you are being seen in search results. A steady rate of organic traffic – or better yet, growth in this regard – will help you determine whether or not your SEO strategies need a bit of revision. A variety of elements can affect your organic traffic, including site age, SEO quality and the amount of content you offer.

Direct Traffic

Direct traffic in many ways will tell you just how popular or well-known your brand is within a given niche. Direct traffic is simply the people who manually enter your website’s address in order to access it. In most cases, this will be people who have either seen your advertisements in one medium or another at an earlier date, or people who have been to your site before. Newer sites will have almost no direct traffic, but as time goes on, this figure should increase. If you seen a sudden shift in the amount of direct traffic you’re generating, then you’ll know that a dramatic change (for better or worse) has occurred.

Social Traffic

Increasingly important in a world dominated by social media, your social traffic will help you discern just how effective your social media strategies are with respect to sending traffic your way. As with most strategies and forms of traffic, newer brands may not enjoy a substantial amount of traffic through this avenue, but brands that are aggressive with social media marketing and promotion may see a majority of their website’s traffic coming through social referrals. Increasingly, some brands are forgoing pinging for SEO and instead adopting a social-only policy, where they generate traffic through a combination of paid and organic social media marketing strategies. A sudden spike in social traffic in Google Analytics will tell you that recent posts or ad campaigns are having their intended effect.

There are several different types of traffic that’ll flow to your website, and each one can be a valuable addition to a diversified traffic portfolio. Where is the largest chunk of your traffic coming from currently? Leave us a comment below and let us know how your traffic is currently structured.