Network traffic: a key factor in the sales funnel

Every business owner who has an online presence pays significant attention to attracting a user audience to the site. This is what is essential for organizing sales of goods and services. Moreover, if a person does not visit your resource, he will not know about the existence of the company as such, will not see what you can offer him. That is why modern business is very sensitive to such a concept as network traffic or Internet traffic, and rightfully considers it one of the most key parameters in the formation of a sales funnel.

So, Internet traffic is a flow of information data, namely the movement of information from one point to another in a certain period of time using a network connection. It changes in values \u200b\u200bmultiples of a byte, that is, it is a certain length of a data block. This parameter can be compared with regular traffic on the roads. By and large, this is the number of cars that will travel a designated section of the road in a certain period of time. That is, everything is exactly the same on the Internet: in one period of time, the traffic intensity will be very high, which will ultimately lead to a slowdown in the Internet channel, its overload, and in another - the bandwidth will be too high for the existing load.

In today's review, we will dwell in detail on what network traffic is and why it is so important when organizing sales. In particular, get acquainted with the main types of traffic to the site and their main purpose. We will describe from which sources you can attract users to your resource. We will tell you about the methods that will allow you to attract network traffic to your service, as well as why it is so important to monitor this indicator, not only for your site, but also for your competitors. We will provide tools that will allow you to compare the traffic of two different sites in order to identify existing problems and eliminate them as quickly as possible. The information provided will allow you to understand all the nuances of this issue and organize the most effective traffic to your site, thereby creating the most effective sales funnel.

Main types of network traffic

Regardless of what resource we are talking about, be it websites, accounts in messengers, social networks and many other such sites, users will be able to connect to them through different channels and in different ways. It is based on this that the main types of network traffic are distinguished, in particular:

1. Organic.
2. Social.
3. Paid.
4. Referral.
5. Direct.

Let's get to know each of these types in more detail.

What is organic traffic to a site

Organic traffic, or as it is often called search traffic, is the data flow that goes to the site through search results. That is, in simpler words, these are the people who enter the relevant queries in their browsers, receive a selection of sites and then go to the portal that suits them.

The main advantages of organic traffic to a site include:

1. High economic efficiency. In essence, such traffic is absolutely free. That is, you do not need to pay for advertising, spend money on promotion. The main thing is to ensure that your resource is in the field of view of users.
2. High quality of the audience. The whole point is that if a person enters a certain query, it means that he is interested in this or that information, relevant goods, services. And this means that he is already obviously interested in what you can offer him. Most of the business's clients are formed from such visitors.
3. Long-term effect. Organic traffic is highly stable. It does not depend on the advertising budget, like paid traffic. That is, here you will not have such a situation that as soon as the money runs out, the entire flow of users will come to naught. As long as you can keep your audience's attention with useful materials and quality products, they will continue to visit your resource.
4. Higher trust indicators. The fact that the site is at the top of search results already in itself makes users confident in its reliability and efficiency, that it presents authoritative and relevant information, and that the goods and services are of high quality. In turn, this inspires trust in people.

And it seems that everything sounds very good and beautiful here, the main problem here is that good organic traffic can only be obtained from those sites that are at the top of search results. That is, it is very important to get to the TOP. And this means that you need to put a lot of effort into optimizing the site. This will require a lot of time and effort from you. You will need high-quality content that meets people's requests and the requirements of search bots. The implementation of this stage is impossible without the appropriate knowledge and skills. The difficulty here is that the algorithms that search engines work on today change quite often. All this must be monitored and constantly adjusted. And it is impossible to predict in advance what kind of traffic you will be able to get when implementing these works. That is why many resource owners combine organic traffic with other options.

Features of social traffic

Already from the name, we can confidently say that social traffic is the generation of a flow of users to a resource through social networks. One of the most significant advantages of such a solution will be huge coverage. And here everything is also logical and clear, since an unrealistic number of people use social networks. And each of them can become a client of your business. But only after you manage to interest them in your goods, services, information.

Along with the ability to reach a large user audience, social traffic has other advantages:

1. Minimal costs for creating and maintaining an account. If you prepare publications yourself, then attracting social traffic will cost you absolutely free. This means that the cost-effectiveness will be quite high.
2. High engagement rates. People who see your content will be able to express their own opinion about it, that is, get in touch with you. Alternatively, they can like, comment, repost. If you interest them in your publications, then there is a good chance that they will pay attention to your products. Moreover, they can share materials with their friends, which will further increase reach and visibility.
3. The ability to use targeting settings to address your posts on social networks to a specific category of users. As a result, with minimal investment, you will make your content visible to those people who are already interested in certain products or services.

But again, along with the advantage, there are also disadvantages. And one of the most important points here is the significant investment of time and effort to maintain an account on social networks. Moreover, it is not always possible to get by with one profile. If you want to reach as many people as possible, you need to connect different social networks, messengers and launch several accounts in them at the same time. At the same time, you will constantly need to interact with the audience, not ignore comments, both positive and negative. In addition, you need to constantly monitor updates to the platform's operating policies and the algorithms they use to constantly prepare relevant material. Otherwise, the conversion rates here will be significantly lower compared to other types of traffic.

What you need to know about paid traffic

Paid traffic is what will allow you to get the desired result in the shortest possible time. And advertising is used here. That is, literally immediately after the launch of the company, people start coming to your site. But this is not the only advantage. Other advantages of paid traffic include:

1. The ability to customize to the target audience. Using advertising, you can convey information about your products and services to a specific audience, taking into account their demographic data, behavioral factors, interests and preferences. That is, you direct the company to people who are highly likely to be interested in your products or content.
2. The ability to easily and simply measure the achieved effect, compare it with material investments and, thus, understand what result you managed to get. Here you can select a number of key indicators and display them on graphs literally in real time. This will allow you to easily make adjustments to the strategy in order to increase its effectiveness.
3. Ensuring complete control over traffic. You yourself determine at what time of day and with what frequency your ad will be shown, focusing on the characteristics of your own target audience and the goals that your business faces.

Now let's move on to the disadvantages. And the first, most obvious point is the need to pay for advertising. And this is not a cheap pleasure. In addition, paid traffic will work as long as the advertising budget is spent. As soon as it runs out, you can forget about the influx of users. But among the not very obvious disadvantages, it is worth highlighting the lower reliability of paid traffic compared to organic. People are generally tired of advertising, imposed services, and products. And the fact that your site is at the top of the search results only because you paid money for it will clearly not increase their level of trust or ensure loyalty.

What do you need to know about referral traffic?

The term referral traffic refers to traffic that results in visitors going to the site via links from third-party resources. The main advantages in this case include:

1. High efficiency. This is due to the fact that users will come to your site from other resources related to the same niche. If they see that a service they trust links to you, this will automatically increase the level of reliability in their eyes.
2. Increasing awareness and diversification. In this case, you can minimize the dependence of traffic on third-party methods of its generation. In addition, the presence of links on external sources is positively perceived by search engines, which will automatically contribute to improving the position of your resource in search results.

Actually, that's where the advantages end. Now about the disadvantages. In particular, referral traffic directly depends on third-party resources, those that you cannot influence in any way. And if their reliability decreases, this automatically negatively affects your service. Depending on what internal processes occur on the referral site, traffic to your resource will be inconsistent. It can fluctuate and depend on a huge number of factors. That is, you will not get stability here. In addition, the conversion rate from such resources will be lower than from other sources, since the consumer market may be unfamiliar with your company and is not always ready to perform the target action.

What are the features of direct traffic?

Direct traffic involves users entering the address of your site directly in the browser. That is, in this case, a person already understands exactly what service he is visiting. The main advantages of this solution include:

1. High conversion rate. If people visit your site, it means that they are already familiar with your products, services and they have a specific decision to visit your resource.
2. Higher trust and loyalty rates. As in the previous point, the whole point is that people are already familiar with your company and are confident in its reliability, the quality of the products provided.
3. Positive impact on website promotion in search results. Search bots note direct traffic and perceive it as an indicator of reliability, popularity and relevance of resources. Thanks to this, the position of sites in the search results improves.
4. Minimum bounce rate. This is due to the fact that users who go to your site via a direct link know what to expect and are set to interact with products and content.

Are there any disadvantages to such a solution? Unfortunately, there are. In particular, we are talking about a fairly low coverage. Only those people who have previously interacted with your site will be able to know the real address of your site. The principles of search engines, on the basis of which you can attract a third-party audience, unfortunately, do not work here. In addition, you will not be able to control how people find your site, how they interact with the content, you will not be able to improve the efficiency of work using key queries. In this case, the source of traffic will be, so to speak, "word of mouth" or offline advertising. That is, in this case, it will be necessary to put in much more effort and time to promote.

Additional traffic classification

Along with the main types that we discussed above, today there is also an additional classification of network traffic. Thus, the following types are also distinguished:

1. Incoming and outgoing traffic. It is clear from the name that incoming traffic is the movement of data from the network to a specific device, and outgoing traffic is the opposite.
2. Global and local traffic. Global traffic means the entire volume of data, on the basis of which the shares of each state in the total contribution of what is done on the Internet are determined. That is, on its basis they determine how many users are present in the network from a particular country or region. Local traffic is used to model load networks and is calculated within local networks.
3. Advertising traffic. It is also called marketing, since it is used to determine the effectiveness of advertising tools that a particular company uses at the promotion stages.

As you can see, there is a fairly wide variety of types of traffic. And it is important to be well versed in all this in order to target specific solutions. Those that will provide high results in your sales funnel. And now it is important to determine what sources of traffic on the Internet exist today.

Main sources of network traffic

By and large, absolutely any site from which the user audience will go to your site can be a source of network traffic. So, the greatest contribution to the influx of user audience is given by:

• Search engines. That is, users enter queries, and the system gives them a selection of sites where they can find the corresponding answers. For this strategy to work in practice, it is necessary to ensure that your site is well indexed by search bots. This is what we have already talked about above, in particular in terms of content optimization, filling it with keywords, its usefulness for the audience. Also, the quality of ranking is significantly affected by the presence of images and their quality, the correctness of meta tags, as well as many other criteria. That is, without SEO optimization of the site, you will not get the desired results.
• Social networks. Today, the share of such a source of traffic in the total data flow on the network is very, very high and continues to increase. At the same time, we are talking not only about organic traffic, but also about advertising traffic. Almost every modern brand has its own publics, which they work on, write posts, make videos, stories, launch various contests, interactive activities in order to attract a user audience. Moreover, to get traffic from social networks, you can use different strategies. Alternatively, you can form target groups and systematically work with them, warming them up and setting them up for placing an order. In this case, you can implement a sales funnel by disclosing the most detailed information about your own product, which will ultimately lead to increased trust in the brand. But you can also try to reach as many unique users as possible, get them to like your publications, comment, and subscribe. As a result, you will be able to reach a really large audience and then work on transforming it into leads.
• Messengers. Today, this source of traffic is significantly inferior to the same social networks, search engines. But this does not mean that it should be discounted. Especially if you consider the fact that every day on such sites the number of users of thematic communities increases. Gradually, messengers are moving away from their immediate purpose - providing communication. Here, many people find useful information and entertainment. If we talk directly about Telegram, then there is already its own platform for advertising, namely Telegram Ads. With its help, you can publish advertising posts in any open channels, while paying for the number of impressions. But still, you need to understand that this platform is not sharpened for, so to speak, aggressive advertising content. There is no particular impudence, excessive brightness, or imposition. Advertising in Telegram is more aimed at showing the advantage of a particular product or service and thereby already contributing to the emergence of interest in a potential client.
• Offline environment. In this case, we are talking about any outdoor advertising, holding various events aimed at promoting products, such as flash mobs, promotional campaigns. Recently, the effectiveness of the offline environment for attracting network traffic has increased significantly due to the emergence of QR codes. Today, they can be seen on absolutely any advertising product and not only. The user simply needs to point the phone at this code and scan it, and the system will immediately redirect you to the official website of the company. That is, this category includes everything that will allow people to learn about your product or service, interest them and encourage them to search for information about it further on the Internet.

Now you know the main types of traffic, you are familiar with the channels through which it can be organized. Now the only thing left is to ensure the flow of this very traffic to your resource. Read on to find out how to do this correctly.

Ways to attract traffic to a site

Today, there are quite a few ways that you can use to attract a user audience to your site. But not all of them will be reliable and safe. In particular, you can attract traffic to your site using technologies presented in three separate groups:

1. White.
2. Gray.
3. Black.

White methods of attracting traffic

White methods include all those methods of attracting network traffic to the site that do not violate advertising laws and fully satisfy the conditions of search engines. The main such methods include:

• Optimization of the site for queries that people enter in search engines. This means reviewing the content and filling it with key queries. Along with working with text content, it is also very important to work with graphic material, site usability, and interlinking as part of optimization. At the same time, all your material should be useful, informative, written in simple and understandable language. Only if these conditions are met will it be possible to move the resource to the top of search results, thereby increasing its visibility and, as a result, traffic to the site.
• Creating viral content. We are talking about preparing material that will arouse increased interest among the user audience and lead to people voluntarily sharing it with their friends and so on, literally causing a chain reaction. But here you need to be very careful, because you can increase the volume of traffic, but no one guarantees that it will seem targeted. That is, the entire range of work in this direction must be carried out so that all this is automatically introduced into the sales funnel. Otherwise, all your efforts will be in vain.
• Launching an advertising campaign. No one forbids you to pay money and advertise your own product on the same social networks, on external media, on radio, television, and so on. But the main difficulty in this case is that not all people have a positive attitude towards advertising, trust it. To get the desired result, it is important to very carefully work out your target audience and focus on it from the very beginning.
• Placing links on thematic resources, such as websites, message boards, forums. In this case, it is necessary to initially agree on everything with the administration of such sites. In some cases, these services will be paid and here it is necessary to compare the amount of investment and the size of the potential benefit. Alternatively, you can agree with other sites on mutual advertising or on placing counter links in your materials. If you perform these actions without the appropriate permission, then such methods of attracting network traffic will clearly not be white.

Gray methods of attracting traffic

This includes all those methods that are not officially prohibited at the legislative level, but they are not perceived positively by either search bots or people. Moreover, their use is fraught with the fact that your site will go down in search results, or even get banned. So decide for yourself whether to use them or not. But it is still important to know what exactly we are talking about here:

• Spam links to your resource. In practice, there are often cases when the owners of certain sites begin to post links to their portal wherever possible. And they hang there until someone deletes them. You should be especially careful when working with social networks, since such communities are immediately banned for spam and without the right to restore.
• Using traffic arbitrage to attract visitors to the site. Despite the fact that this area is developing very actively today, the system does not treat it favorably. Therefore, in this case, it is important to pay special attention to the selection of specialists. Only an experienced arbitrageur will be able to bypass existing bans and organize traffic to the site without the risk of running into blocking.

Resorting to such methods or not is an individual matter. This is the case when you work at your own risk.

Black methods of attracting traffic

Already from the name you can judge that in this case we are talking about methods that are prohibited by the system and these prohibitions are prescribed at the legislative level. That is, already at the first detection, penalties, blocking, lightning-fast reduction of sites in the search results are applied. Such methods include:

• Artificial increase in link mass using a large number of donor sites. The problem here is that such links will be temporary, and their relevance is very low, since the donor's topic will not always coincide with the site that you are promoting. This technology was called “link purchase” and was very popular several years ago. But changes in search engine algorithms and their improvement have led to the fact that today the effect of increasing the link mass will be minimal, if not zero.
• Cheating through bots, freelance exchanges of the same comments, likes, views. In this case, we are talking about the fact that a bot or a paid user moves around your site, lingers on certain pages, scrolls them to the end, follows internal links. As a result, it is believed that such an action should improve ranking indicators. Perhaps it will be so if search algorithms do not detect such a thing and do not apply penalties.
• Using satellite sites. They are created specifically to provide additional support for the main resource in search results. They are specially filled with content with high-frequency and mid-frequency keywords, links to the main site. Moreover, the content itself is the last thing that is paid attention to. Such actions are also easily detected by the system and satellite sites are blocked, and the main resource may suffer along with them.
• Launching invisible content. Today, this technique is almost never used in practice, but we will still briefly talk about it. We are talking about the fact that on a page with text content, key queries are additionally written in very small or even transparent font so that an ordinary user does not notice them. In the same way, links can be hidden in punctuation marks, in the smallest graphic elements. All this is done to improve the visibility of the site in search engines, but in reality the situation may be the opposite.
• Cloaking. Quite an interesting technology, in which the content of the page is automatically changed using a special script. The link may look quite natural and fit into the main theme of the page, but if you click on it, the user will find himself on a completely different resource that has nothing to do with this one. By the way, to combat this, a tool called anticloaking is used.

The risk that your site will be banned using the tools in this category is very, very high. Therefore, resources that care about their own reputation do not resort to black hat methods.

Why is it so important to analyze traffic?

Ensuring good traffic to a site is one of the mandatory aspects of effective resource promotion, organizing a decent level of sales, increasing loyalty from the user audience, search bots. But how do you know that the traffic is good? Was it better yesterday than today or not? Did the measures you took affect the site's traffic? Only by knowing the answers to these questions can you make some changes to your own strategy and help the site to be effectively promoted and bring you profit. And this means that traffic needs to be analyzed. By doing this work, you will be able to:

1. Understand how exactly the user audience interacts with your site, which pages they visit most often, which ones less often, which ones they linger on for a long time and read to the end, which ones they close literally immediately after opening. Knowing people's behavioral factors, you will be able to understand which pages work well for you, and which ones require radical improvements.
2. Determine the effectiveness of launched marketing strategies. Traffic analysis is what will allow you to understand through which channels people access your resource: through search engines, advertising, social networks or some other channels. Knowing this, you will be able to focus your efforts on those solutions that give the greatest effect in practice, in particular the traffic itself and conversions, thereby further improving the indicators.
3. Timely identify technical problems that exist on the site. So, if you see that the number of visitors to the resources has decreased several times, if there is a high bounce rate, then there is a high probability that the matter is precisely in a technical failure. Perhaps the page is loading too slowly or an error is displayed when loading it.

But it is important to analyze not only your own sites, but also the sites of competitors. This way you can compare the indicators of third-party resources with yours and select those areas that need to be improved in order to increase traffic and, as a result, sales. And to solve these problems, the modern market offers special tools.

TOP tools for traffic analysis

In order to determine the traffic to the site and compare it with other resources, different tools can be used. Some of the most accurate, but at the same time easy-to-use solutions include:

• SEMRush. An international service that is in high demand in many countries around the world. Displays traffic to the site both in real time and over a certain period of time, which allows you to track the growth of visitors and control the viewing depth. The information is displayed in the form of tables and graphs. And with its help, you can see the traffic coming from mobile and desktop devices, check through which channels this is carried out. You can also sort users coming from a particular country in the world. In addition, the service analyzes key queries and monitors the effectiveness of advertising campaigns, performs a mass analysis of backlinks, helps to find the most interesting topics for creating content and provides recommendations, following which you can prepare the content of the site, which will fully satisfy the requirements of search bots and people. And you can also use such tools as a social network tracker, SEO checker, brand monitoring, autoposting. The program is presented in two interface options: Russian and English.
• SimilarWeb. Despite the fact that the service has an exclusively English-language interface, it is quite easy to understand. With its help, you can see the traffic leading to the site and compare the indicators of two different resources for the same period of time. To use it, you do not need to go through authorization, but in this case, you will only be able to see data for the last month. In addition, if we talk about competitors, the information will be displayed only for those sites that have been visited by more than 5,000 users over the past 30 days. Among the main functional capabilities of the service, we highlight the demonstration of bounce rates, viewing depth and session duration, the type of devices from which the connection was made and demographic indicators, the source of traffic. A traffic graph is created for third-party services. It is also possible to track traffic for each of the launched marketing strategies, which will ultimately allow you to understand which decision was the most correct. This application will be especially convenient for analyzing mobile applications, as it determines the frequency of downloads over several months, session time, number of visits, and the dynamics of position changes. This is what will allow you to study the interests of the target audience and its activity.
• Ahrefs. With the help of this service, you can perform cross-link analysis, check key queries, compare domain names, find the most popular publications of competitors. Based on the information received, you can create a content plan that will subsequently require minimal adjustments and will be truly effective. You can also make changes to an existing strategy in order to increase its effectiveness. Also, comprehensive traffic control is performed here both to your and to a third-party resource. This service is paid for use, but in order to test it, a trial version is offered, which you can use without payment for a week.
• SerpStat. This solution is worth using if you want to analyze traffic to sites that operate in another country in the world. It will display data on the number of visitors, the number of queries by which the site is ranked, and a number of other indicators. This service will be very convenient for tracking the effectiveness of SEO promotion, as it shows an increase in traffic from Google search results for the period of time you select. Along with checking traffic to your site and competitors' sites, this analytical tool will also help you perform a comprehensive analysis of key queries and links, check the frequency of queries, for example, per month, data loading speed, text analytics, which will allow you to group keywords most correctly.
• Alexa. A service that you can use to monitor sites in any country and region of the world, work with your resources and competitors' sites. Traffic is checked for each source, which allows you to evaluate the effectiveness of each of them and thereby determine how SMM promotion, search engine optimization, contextual advertising and other strategies work. The data obtained will allow you to identify current trends in the market and adjust your own business to them. Among the functionality of this service, they highlight the display of the percentage of traffic coming from different countries of the world, the bounce rate, fluctuations in the position of the service in search results, the average time a user spends on the portal, bounce rates, a list of domains linking to a specific site. The service is paid to use. Users are offered 4 tariffs, which will differ in functionality. But the interface here is exclusively in English.

Let's sum it up

We hope that now you have finally figured out all the nuances of traffic and understand how important this indicator is in the sales funnel and that it must be constantly monitored. Moreover, we have provided services with which you can automate these works and get the maximum result with minimal effort. But the last point that I would like to draw your attention to is the need for additional connection of mobile proxies, as an option from the MobileProxy.Space service.

Only in this way can you ensure yourself an effective bypass of any regional restrictions, avoid all the risks that you may encounter in your work from search engines, including blocking, penalties. Also, using a proxy guarantees the preservation of privacy and security of work on the Internet. To evaluate the functionality and get to know the product in more detail, follow the link https://mobileproxy.space/en/user.html?buyproxy. You can also contact technical support for advice, including if you encounter any difficulties in the work process.

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