Which are the main channels you use to drive traffic to your website?

Question

Hey everyone!

I wanted to ask all of you about the main channels you use to drive traffic to your website: Organic search, Email, Paid Search, Social Media, Referrals or any others that you might consider important.

Thanks a lot for sharing!

Andrew Kpyto · Accepted Answer

Let's see, here is main channels in random order:

Direct traffic
Organic traffic
Social traffic
Referral traffic
Email traffic
Paid traffic

You count it into your message :) I don't think that exact % of each one is kind of open discussion, it depends of many things and stage of product life.

Andrew Kpyto · Answer

@investeringstankar I don't think so :)

Ana Dodig · Answer

@kpyto @investeringstankar in my opinion web pushes is so annoying, you don't want to use them as main channel. The best solution is to have good SEO, because if you have organic & direct 70-80% of all traffic, you are on the right road to win-win scenario!

Anna from InAppStory · Answer

Social traffic is really helpful for blog articles. Direct and organic to have good quality leads. We don't use now paid traffic, maybe later.

Pablo Palmitas · Answer

SEO is the main channel for us right now. Although I am a great supporter of social media, for software companies I think it's not the best way to promote their product and get leads. SEO, on the other hand, is much more effective and straightforward. People are searching for things you offering so you just make it easier for your potential customers to find it.

Derek Duban · Answer

84% organic mostly via image search.
I'm not sure the remaining 16% is worth the effort I put into it, but it amounts to Pinterest, Twitter, and Giphy posts with watermarks on images.
At this point, I need to focus on getting backlinks but those are really hard to come by without tons of time (wasted?) or paying for them.
I'm just not sure I'll have the time to go after backlinks the hard way.

Martina Hackbartt · Answer

@kpyto Thank you very much, Andrew! Very insightful :)

Victoria Isla · Answer

Organic search.

Andrew Kpyto · Answer

@martina_hackbartt well, it is not :) But how exactly are you going to analyze examples?

Let's do a mind experiment; for my pet project, I have these traffic channels:
- referral 32,3%
- organic 20,11%
- email/push etc - 1%
- direct 47,46%
- and paid for last one's %

Which kind of insight can you take from that without deeper analysis? :)

Jason Grills · Answer

We’ve been using social media as a prominent channel to drive traffic to our website. But other than that, we are also focusing on building high-quality content that ranks well in SERPs and helps people land on our website. These are just the organic marketing efforts we are making from our end

Ana Dodig · Answer

@tsvetanakos I agree that social is valuable source but you don't want to rely on social algorithms. They are very changeable, especially FB. Organic should be the main focus.

Derek Duban · Answer

@martina_hackbartt By image search I just mean clicking the image icon in the search results, so that you get a screen full of thumbnails. For me, this week it means "Christmas gifs". When people search on that they get the usual list of web sites, but at the top they get some thumbnails, and if they click on a thumbnail or the image icon on the tab up top, then they get the full page of images. That's what I'm calling image search. Image search SEO, it seems to me, is an entirely different ball game than other seo.
SEO often preaches lengthy content 1000-2000 words per page. This doesn't make sense for each image in a gallery.
The real key is to make your images stand out. Sheer volume of images won't help, I tried that.
Then backlinks.
One way to get around the 1000-2000 word requirement is to make articles with titles like "Top 10 Best Good Morning GIFs" and then describe each image in detail in that list.
By the nature of the Internet, I have some kind individuals, without my consent, including my images deep-linked into their "GIF" list articles. Those sweeties are also so nice as to show my domain name with the stolen image (but not a as link).
I've been letting them continue to use my images since I suspect the deep link will count as a backlink. So cheers to me, I got someone else writing long articles linking to my site in exchange for some bandwidth. They use so little bandwidth its not even worth me doing anything about it.

Well, I could write tons more, but I'm starting to babble.
Oh yeah, watermarks. They been very helpful but I have overused them a bit, so I'm starting to be more generous with watermark free downloads.
Writing this got me thinking about all this again. Thanks.

Trey Chong · Answer

SEO is still the best way to drive traffic. Do it in a natural way, Google algorithm likes natural and consistency. Prevent building backlinks at low Domain Rating (DR) webs, I use Alexa Chrome plug-in, will ignore the webs ranked above 100k.

Tsvetan Tsvetanov · Answer

Social and organic traffic are extremely valuable, but building a large network, or a good website will take some time.
For quick results I am using reddit and/or torrent sites.

Bernadette Cau · Answer

@treychong content marketing is the best way to ensure natural and consistent link-buidling. It also brings higher trust to you as a thought leader. However, it's long and and requires lots of effort.

Which are the main channels you use to drive traffic to your website?

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