Where is my website traffic coming from?

Common traffic sources

• Social – When you write content, that content can be published by you or others on social media networks such as Youtube, Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook, Instagram, or even chat applications such as WhatsApp.
• Search – based on data analysis conducted by GrowthBadger on 3.25 billion website visits, search traffic is the single largest online traffic source, driving well over 50% of most industries’ web traffic. Also, they found that Google’s search engine drives x8 more traffic than all social media websites combined.
• Direct – direct traffic is usually generated by word to mouth. Your brand is mentioned by your customers to their friends, and other customers will access your domain directly. Also, returning users will probably counted as direct traffic at some point, as they already know your website and will directly return to it if they need it again.
• Niche sites – some niches have large websites with large enough communities to drive large number of visitors to your website. For example, it may make a lot of sense that if you have a tech related blog post rank high on Reddit or Hackernews, it will probably drive thousands or tens of thousands of visits per day.
• Referrals – Other websites that link to your website and drive traffic to it. It can be a blog post that reviews your product, or a list of “top X products …” that mentions your website and sends visitors to your website to find more information.
• Email – email marketing and email newsletters can drive very targeted visitors to your website. Those readers are usually interested in a specific niche, so if it’s a similar niche to the one you’re targeting in your website, you’re in luck.

Identify sources of traffic with an analytics tool

Automatic analytics tools can simplify the task of identifying your website’s traffic sources. You can use tools such as Visualime to identify where your website traffic is coming from. This is how it will look like after you set it up:

Visualime will identify where your visitors are coming from, how many visitors you get from that source every day, and you can explore the data even further by identifying those visitors primary geo-locations, types of devices and more.

Find the social media post that drives traffic to your website

If you already know that a specific social media platform is driving visitors to your website and you’re looking to just pinpoint that post, you can just search for your product name, or domain name on that platform.

For example, let’s assume I’m looking for posts that are driving visitors to Nike’s website, I can search for “nike.com” in Twitter’s search bar, choose “Latest” to order the results by the date, and now I can review the posts that have mentioned Nike’s website on Twitter recently.