The goal of online marketing is to drive as many visitors as possible to a given website. While this can be a worthwhile cause, it is also important to remember that not all website visitors are created equal. A certain subsection of your visitors will inherently be more interested in buying your product, contacting you, or just generally engaging with your website or brand in a productive way. These are the visitors that you want.
So, where do they come from?
Most websites will attract visitors in three different ways:
- Referral: A visitor will come to the website by clicking on a link from a blog or another website.
- Social: A visitor will come to the website through a social media platform such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.
- Search: A visitor will come to the website by searching for a topic on a search engine and clicking through to your site. This is known organic search traffic.
In order to decide where to focus the majority of your energy and marketing budget, it is always helpful to know which one of these three sources provides you with the most valuable website visitors. The answer will vary from one business or industry to the next, so you will need to look at your analytics to know for sure.
You will want to find out which visitors:
- Convert: Determine which source delivers visitors who will buy your product, download your e-book or brochure, contact you, or whatever you decide is a “conversion” for your business.
- Come Back: Check to see where your return visitors are coming from. Return visitors are much more likely to be interested in your business than visitors who visit once and never come back.
- Spend Time on Your Site: Review which visitors are spending a lot of time on your website. Even if they are not converting immediately, at least they are spending time learning more about your company and are interested in what you are doing.
After spending your time analyzing this data, one source of traffic will most likely stand out to you as the most valuable one to your business. For most companies, it is a good idea to focus the majority of your time, money and energy on this source in order to maximize your returns.
Of course, you should continually reevaluate your data to see if anything needs to be changed over time.