Have you ever wondered where your website traffic comes from? How are people finding your website? What sources are bringing them there? Knowing where people are coming from when visiting your website is very helpful for understanding how strong your SEO, brand awareness, and social media presence are across the web.
Different Website Traffic Sources
At Blue Frog, we use the sources report tool in HubSpot to examine where website traffic is coming from. In this blog post, we’re going to focus on the HubSpot sources report and the various traffic sources it shows us.
HubSpot shows us five different sources:
- Organic search
- Referrals
- Social media
- Email marketing
- Direct traffic
1. Organic Search
Organic search traffic is our favorite traffic source because it represents visitors coming into a site from search engines like Google. Getting a high amount of traffic from organic search results means that your website’s SEO is very strong! This is great because having strong SEO means you’re not having to pay for ads or outside sources to get people to find your site; they are simply finding you through search engines. If you have low traffic coming to your site from organic search results, then it's likely that people are not easily finding your site online, and it's time to optimize and create more quality content! See our free eBook below to learn how improving your SEO can help boost sales.
2. Referrals
Referral traffic represents the traffic coming to your site from other websites that are not search engines or social media sites. If another website links to your site in their blog, for example, or if you write a guest blog post for another website and link to your website in the author bio, the visitors arriving at your site through that link would show up as a referral sources. Referral traffic, which arrives through backlinks from other sites, helps to build your website's online authority.
3. Social Media
Social media is a pretty simple traffic source to understand. In HubSpot, the software can read all the traffic that’s coming from social sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. If you post regularly to these sites or run ads on Facebook, you would expect to see a decent amount of website traffic coming from social media.
4. Email Marketing
The email marketing traffic source shows the traffic coming from marketing emails you may be sending out. If your company only sends out an occasional newsletter, don’t expect to see too much traffic from this source. But if you’re a large company running automated workflows that send out emails on a regular basis to a large list of leads, you may be getting a lot of traffic back to your site from those emails.
5. Direct Traffic
Direct traffic is a good source for measuring your brand awareness. Direct traffic represents the traffic coming to your site from people manually entering your website URL. These people are coming straight to your site from a browser without going through a search engine or any other source. Direct traffic is a good representation of your brand awareness; if your brand is not well known or perhaps you have a very new website, your direct traffic will be very low. Businesses that are seasonal will often see a spike in direct traffic during their busy time of the year and a drop during their slow season.
As you can see, the HubSpot sources report is very valuable for understanding where your traffic is coming from, providing insight into what areas of your marketing strategy are performing well and what areas you may need to improve.
To learn more about how Blue Frog can use HubSpot to improve your online marketing efforts, schedule a free consultation today!
