Basically, website traffic refers to the web users who visit your website. If they’ve typed in your URL or clicked on your hyperlink, they’ve driven website traffic for your site.

By measuring how many people visit your site, for how long, and how often, businesses are able to measure how well they’re attracting an audience. 

Why Should I Care About Website Traffic?

When ecommerce was in its infancy in the 1990’s, website traffic was the most important metric with which to measure a website’s popularity. 

But now, several decades later, there are other, more accurate ways of determining a website’s performance. So then why still care about web traffic?

When you compare that raw number of how many people visited your site vs. website conversions, you can get a lot of useful information about your site and the way you’re marketing your product. 

For example, if one hundred people visited your site a day, but only ten are buying something from it, you can determine that your SEO is bringing people to your site, but it isn’t leading conversions. 

If you’re only getting twenty visitors a day, but fifteen of those visitors are generating conversions, that means your site is doing a great job of selling your product, but your digital presence is weak.

What is Organic Website Traffic Versus Regular Website Traffic?

Measuring how potential customers got to your site provides crucial information about the health and success of your marketing strategies. 

Organic Website Traffic is any web traffic that comes from search engines and is earned, not bought. If you’re looking for a car with good gas mileage and you don’t care what brand it is, you’ll search “cars with good gas mileage” and a variety of sites will pop up. The site you click on (that isn’t a sponsored ad) will be getting organic website traffic.

Direct Website Traffic is any traffic that does not come from a referring website. This can happen when someone types your URL into the search bar or clicking your site from a bookmarked link. If you want a new car and want to buy from a trusted brand like Toyota, you’re going to go to Toyota.com to buy. That’s direct traffic.

The difference between these two types of traffic has everything to do with user intent. 

If you’re getting a lot of organic traffic, your SEO and other digital presence is bringing in a lot of visitors. 

If you’re getting a lot of direct traffic, you probably have a ton of brand awareness in your industry and people are searching specifically for YOU.