What Exactly Is Traffic, From a Marketing Point of View? Articles | Entrepreneur

By: Richard Butler

From a marketing point of view traffic is people coming to your website. Short and simple, I won't bore you with technical terminology.

Traffic is important as the more people who come to your website the more possibility you have of making money.

Where does traffic come from?

It can come from many places, the most likely is from search engines, although people may find your site from promotional material that they were given with your website address on it. Other times traffic may come from links from other peoples websites who are linking to you.

Can I check where my traffic is coming from?

Yes, in fact it's essential you know where you traffic is coming from so you can analyze and plan your marketing for your website.

Within your web hosing account you should be able to check log files. These are files that record information about visitors to your website. Depending on your hosting company you may have access to a program called awstats, which displays a lot of information in a very readable format.

Within awstats, you can find out where traffic is coming from, from what search engines, and what keywords were used to find your site. You can also find out what sites people came from for your site. This is very, very important, so check to see if your hosting company provides this.

Is all traffic equal?

No! There are companies and web sites that can guarantee you traffic to your website, however many times this traffic is all automated. This means that they run a script which shows hits to your website but no one actually sees it. Other sites will put your website up on sites where people get credits or points to view other peoples sites.

The traffic above is not targetted traffic. Your aim is to get targetted traffic to your site. Targetted traffic are web surfers who are interested, or potentially interested in what you have to offer. Put it this way. If you get 100 people to your website that have no interest in growing roses, then you're not going to make a lot of sales. However if you get 10 people who are really interested and your site offers them something of value, then your potential to sell to them is increased.

It's important to now read the article entitled "What to do when traffic arrives.." You'll find it at http://www.ebits.ie