7 Types of Website Traffic Your Site Gets And What Pays.

Lots of people and gurus preach the mantra of how traffic is king to a website’s success and I often follow people’s blogs who get excited about getting 1, 100 or more visitors to their page.

Yet they never specify the type of traffic they’re getting, either because they don’t understand that it makes all the difference and/or they want to sell people the idea that the bigger the number, the better.

Let me ask you something…

If I were to offer you a gold coin, without giving you any information on it, would you not care what karat it was?

Would you just accept it on the basis of me saying it’s a gold coin? I think if you knew something about karats, you wouldn’t, as 24 is the best you can get and lots of gold coins out there aren’t made with the same purity. 

The same kind of analogy is absolutely applicable to website traffic because the fact of the matter is, what type of visitors you get makes ALL the difference in whether that makes you a successful website owner or not.

In this article, I will help you distinguish the type of visitors your site is getting to understand if it’s “24 karat”, or not and when I say that, I mean, will it make you rich or poor?

Overall, there’s 7 types of traffic, each with their own rating of how useful or useless it is:

Obviously, if you’re seeking success on your website, it’s the USEFUL traffic you’ll want. So let me explain which of these 7 it is:

1) Junk traffic. Value: Low.

Junk traffic is the most useless there is. Compare this to a worthless coin painted in gold, passed off as gold and you basically have the equivalent of what this is.

Here are examples of this:

-You go to random forums and spam your page’s link all around, hoping to get a few visitors. 

-You buy packages from arbitrary websites that promise your page millions of hits for a low price.

-You mis-advertise your page and attract the wrong kind of visitor to your website, making them extremely unlikely to stay or buy anything.

-You get bots to your page instead of actual visitors and this makes you think you’re getting somewhere.

In short, the type of visitor/s who come to your page from this method are irrelevant, none buyers who may or may not be fake. If you use this method to get visitors to your page, I can guarantee that it will fail, 100% of the time. So this is a poor form of generating visitors.

2) Direct traffic, aka referral. Value: Varies.

When you send a friend an email or post a link on your social network channel and followers/friends/family click and visit the page, that’s basically what it is.

Now this approach’s success is based on how it is used and in what context. The examples I offered above are usually times when it won’t produce good results. Usually under those circumstances, the people clicking on your page have no intention of buying anything other than offering what I call “click support”, but that doesn’t do anything but give the page owner an illusion that they are seeing success.

They may see the numbers climb on their page, but it won’t lead anywhere else, at least not sales or sign ups.

Now there’s examples of when it can work too. For example:

Collecting an email list of relevant subscribers and sending them links and offers to relevant products/content. This will generally be considered a direct form of attracting visitors and the ones who are more likely to buy or do something to bring you money.

3) Paid traffic. Value: Can be high or low.

Anytime you pay for ads/visits, it’s considered to be a paid form of marketing. And it can like the direct form in #2 be both successful and not successful.

You can for example pay for junk visits, but as you already know, that won’t amount to any success.

Now as a contrary example, you can pay for ads to bring you the RIGHT type of visitor, aka the perfect buyer audience your page requires. That would work.

Here’s some options of good networks to consider for this:

Bing Ads, Google Adwords, FB Ads, IG ads.

If used correctly, these networks can direct (no pun intended) the RIGHT kind of visitor to your page. And that leads me to the next example:

4) Relevant, targeted visitors. Value: High.

Let’s reuse the gold analogy. The more relevant a visitor that comes to your page, the more profitable that is for it (closer to the 24 karat mark). And I also commonly use the following term: Laser targeted, aka the MOST relevant.

-Now relevancy has a score of 1-10, just like gold has a karat rating of up to 24 (the best). So…

-If I have a page that talks about turtle health and sells supplies, but attracts basketball enthusiasts, that’s BAD.

-If I own a website that talks about turtle care and I attract general pet owners, it’s not that good, because pet owners can be a wide range of animal owners that have nothing to do with turtle care.

-If I own a website that gives advice on selling turtles and I attract turtle owners to the page, that’s the right kind of visitor, the relevant kind. But it’s still not 100% there.

-Using the same idea, if I own red eared sliders (a specific type of turtle breed) and attract red eared slider owners to the page, that’s the BEST kind of relevant visitor. This is your 24 karat visitor, the perfect 10 out of 10 you seek.

If nothing else, #4 is the BEST type of traffic you will ever find, absolutely remember this. It is the most profitable one, the one you absolutely need if you’re going to make your page make GOOD money.

5) Cold/Irrelevant visitors. Value: Low.

Basically anything opposite of relevant. Take the first example of having a turtle page but getting people interested in completely none turtle issues to the page. That could either be junk or cold traffic. That’s your perfect example there.

The less closer the audience is to your page’s topic, the less likely they are to be a profitable one for you.

6) Organic traffic. Value: Medium/High.

Any type of visitor that finds your page through Google, Bing, Yahoo, FB on their own merit, is the organic one. Generally, these types of people are of the relevant sort. In my experience, a page can have the most success over a long period of time, and for a long period of time if it gets organic traffic. Organic traffic generally comes when you have high rankings on search engines (1st page). 

7) Social network traffic. Value: Varies.

Any type of visit that comes from a popular network like IG (Instagram), Google+, Pinterest, FB fan page and/or any other social network site is an example of this.

Now just like any other of the forms above, relevancy also plays a major role in IF it will the successful sort…

For example:

If I create an IG page with my personal pictures, this is not a good marketing practice. You need to make a page with a specific niche topic in mind. Again if I use turtles like I did many times above, I could make an IG page with turtle pictures and lead people interested in these pictures to a site where I show how to take care of them. That’s an example of attracting relevant people (Also use relevant hashtags that are popular and involve the word turtle in it).

The main thing about social networks is that they carry a wide range of niche audiences and you should structure whatever social network page you decide to make to attract the specific niche audience kind of like with the example I just used for IG.

My final thoughts:

With the exception of junk traffic, the other forms I mentioned above can be made to work if you utilize relevancy correctly.

Here’s another way to explain it: It’s all about the right niche audience coming to the right niche site and every way to do it above (except #1) can be altered to correctly make that work. 

Do not underestimate this stuff because very often people mistake the number of visits a page gets as a reflection of success. The fact is, it is not. If you want that 24 karat traffic, you need to understand relevancy and how to use it on your page.