Visitors to your website must come from some corner of the Internet. They may search for your website from a search engine, they may directly enter your website address to access it, or they may click to enter your website from any other source.
But when all types of visitors come to your site, they do so with awareness. These visitors come to your site for different reasons. Next, we will analyze these reasons from a psychological perspective to better understand how people will behave when they come to your website from different channels.
search engine traffic
When someone enters a website from a search engine, they are generally looking for an answer to a specific question or information on a certain topic.
Imagine the essence of a search engine: enter the keywords/words you need and hope to find the answer. This means that visitors from search engines will stay on your site and read the content to find the information they need. If they can't find the answer they need on your website, they might find it in one of your ads. Generally this means you can get a higher ad click-through rate from visitors coming from search engines.
Research results show that in recent years, people have begun to trust the search results of search engines, which naturally has a huge impact on websites. If your website's search ranking for a certain keyword is very high, the website's recognition can be improved.
This study also shows that if you are ranked first in the search results for a certain keyword, many people will regard you as an industry authority. This has a direct impact on how people react when they come to your website. If new visitors already have a good impression of you before they come to your site, you can gain some trust from them—in which case, they'll be more likely to sign up or subscribe to your site.
direct traffic
Direct traffic is traffic that comes from people visiting your website by typing it directly into the address bar. This is a better kind of traffic - visitors have remembered your website address, which at least means your domain name is easy to remember.
In the past, Internet users almost always visited a website directly. Visitors from direct traffic mainly come to know if there are updates to the website. In this case, visitors are less likely to click on the ads, and they selectively ignore the ads on the website.
These visitors are more likely to interact with your site by joining your social network or subscribing to your blog (if they haven't done so before). In addition, direct traffic visitors are also the most likely group to comment on your articles because they want to leave their own footprints on their favorite websites.
social media traffic
The overall psychological analysis of the social media revolution ultimately boils down to users’ desire to be noticed and have a personal space online. Someone pointed out that
Social media users either want to communicate better with friends or want to enrich their entertainment activities. Visitors from social media often result in high bounce rates – they look at your site, are entertained for a while, and then it’s time to leave.
The benefit of social media traffic is that it allows your website content to spread quickly. These visitors tend to browse quickly from website to website and if they do find interesting content, they won’t hesitate to share it. When someone starts discussing your website content, products, and images, they are promoting you.
Recommended traffic
Referral traffic and social media traffic have several things in common, but they also have differences, similar to the difference between when you hear the same thing from a friend versus when you hear it from a network engineer.
When a friend tells you something, you try it, based on a mentality of knowing the information or experiencing the fun. When a network engineer tells you the same thing, you will almost look at it with the same mentality, but with an added mentality of trust. This is similar to a doctor and a friend who has read relevant medical books introducing you to a disease at the same time. You believe both, but you prefer the doctor's opinion.
Of course this analogy doesn’t apply to all referral traffic. For example, when you click on a link in the website's friendly link list, you believe that the website owner has chosen the friendly links carefully, and your target is exactly the text of the link you clicked.
Since visitors don't get much information in advance, traffic arriving at your website in this way is likely to result in a higher bounce rate and lower interaction rate. On the other hand, if recommendations are made through links within the content or from guest authors, the visitor is more likely to stay on the target site—out of trust or curiosity about the source of the recommendation.
For the latter two types of recommended traffic - guest articles and internal links - the possible behavior of visitors is to learn a little about your website and determine whether there is content that can attract them. If so, they may interact with you, such as following your Weibo, subscribing to your website, etc. .
paid advertising
The difference between traffic from paid ads and search engine traffic is this: People who click on ad links don't mind clicking on ads again.
Some people never click on ads; some people click on ads occasionally. But visitors who reach your website by clicking on an ad are more likely to continue clicking on ads on your website. Of course that’s the problem – if they’ve already clicked on the ad once and don’t find the answer they need, they’ll click away too. This is why most of the sites that use paid advertising are one-page websites that contain quick direct advertising.
What kind of traffic do you need?
If you’re trying to gain new readers and want more people to click on your ads, you can target search engine traffic. If you want more website interaction, it is recommended to choose recommended traffic optimization. This approach is the best way to ensure that visitors are already interested in your website or even topic before visiting.
For image and video websites, social media traffic is the goal to strive for, because visual content is more likely to attract attention and be more entertaining to the hard-to-please social network audience.
Each traffic generation method has its specific role and can be optimized according to the needs of your own website.
Article source: Compiled by WordPress (please indicate the source link for reprinting)
English source: http://www.problogger.net