Website Traffic

Website traffic is the sum of the visitors who open a website within a certain period. A distinction is made between organic traffic from search engines and referrals and paid traffic from advertising campaigns. For the success of a site, a mix of both sources is usually what matters.

Website traffic means the sum of the visitors on a website within a certain period. Website traffic is the most important metric for a webmaster. To increase the visitor numbers of a site, a webmaster has a number of measures at their disposal.

Traffic sources

The first distinction is between organic traffic and paid traffic. Organic traffic means page views that reach the site through search engines or backlinks. Paid traffic, by contrast, means website visitors generated through advertising campaigns. Paid traffic is everywhere - whether it is a Facebook ad, Google Ads or a YouTube pre-roll.

Practically every halfway successful internet project would not survive against its competition without online advertising. Only niche sites can still become known today without much advertising. Anyone who does not want to spend budget can advertise free of charge on eBesucher and earn the advertising credit in the surfbar themselves.

For the success of a website a balanced middle ground between both sources is decisive. Why? Relying on Google alone is fatal, because a site can collapse overnight through no fault of its own - for instance when your own content is stolen by another webmaster. Google treats that as duplicate content and penalises your page in the rankings.

At the same time, paid advertising is only half as successful when a website is not optimised for SEO. A domain lost in the depths of Google's rankings and without interesting content will not move mountains with paid traffic either. For a project to go viral and for visitor numbers to rise exponentially, synergies between both areas are usually needed.

Organic traffic: generating website traffic through SEO

Both OnPage optimization and OffPage optimization are among the most important methods a webmaster should use for the success of their website. The goal is to place the site successfully against the competition in search engines. The webmaster orients themselves towards Google's guidelines and does SEO.

A better ranking brings more organic traffic. Interesting content, matching keywords, high-quality backlinks and a social media presence are among the most important methods for generating organic traffic. Google rewards them with a favourable ranking for the domain.

Organic traffic is very high-quality traffic. Every webmaster wishes for as much purely organic traffic as possible. It implies that a visitor visited the website voluntarily. That visitor therefore has a presumably strong interest and is relatively easy to win as a returning visitor or customer.

The advantages of paid traffic

Buying traffic has a bad reputation, but that is largely unfounded. Estimates by Ahrefs.com found that more than 90 % of the websites on the internet receive no traffic from Google at all. Only 0.3 % of websites receive 1,000 visits or more per month. So how do you get visits if not through optimised keywords and backlinks? Through advertising.

Paid traffic exists in abundance. From tendentially expensive providers such as Google Ads to cheap, self-managed ad networks such as eBesucher, there is a wealth of different ways to buy visitors. In what follows, the numerous advantages of paid traffic advertising are examined.

Increasing visibility with paid traffic

One of the essential advantages of paid traffic is its influence on the visibility of a website. The more visitors open a page, the stronger the user signals search engines evaluate.

Paid traffic makes a website known

Revenue for online advertising rises every year; according to estimates the growth rates are in the double-digit percentage range. Every one of us visits websites, consciously or unconsciously, that are promoted through a marketing campaign. Whether the advertising leaves a positive or a negative impression on the visitor: booking advertising creates awareness.

There is no bad advertising, only campaigns that are executed badly. Anyone spending several euros for one click on their website through Google Ads will usually not recoup their advertising. In that case it is worth sourcing bought page visits elsewhere.

Reaching the right audience easily

Whoever advertises through an ad network can usually determine the right target audience very precisely. That only makes sense, since the customer should always be king. Targeting works considerably better here than with organic traffic, where the webmaster only has indirect influence on where visitors come from. On top of that, bought website traffic scales perfectly.

On eBesucher the audience can be narrowed down through a range of visitor filters. Beyond that you can advertise for selected interests. As for scalability, the desired number of visitors can be set individually per hour, day and week.

Buying paid website traffic: what to watch out for

Traffic analysis - where do my visits come from?

Some advertisers have come badly unstuck with paid traffic. Quickly googling "cheap traffic", clicking the first result and booking advertising within a few minutes - that can only be warned against. Unfortunately there are some black sheep and shrewd resellers who fight their way through the Google algorithm and take orders for advertising from a top placement.

The result for the advertiser there - or on platforms such as eBay or Fiverr - is usually sobering. Our tip: find out where the website traffic is generated. Resellers market no product of their own. They use their knowledge to book advertising cheaply on other portals for a fraction of the cost.

In such cases the customer therefore pays first and foremost for the management of a campaign. They could have booked the advertising themselves far more cheaply. In the statistics the traffic then usually does not look bad at all, but conversions are, in our experience, rather the exception.

Do your research and do not take the first Google suggestion. The competition is large, and before you consider an ad network for paid traffic, look it up on the web. Reviews and feedback are easy to find on successful providers.

Keep an eye on the cost-benefit ratio

Keep an overview of the costs. On large ad networks a lot of money can be burned very quickly. New campaigns should be built up carefully. The benefit must never be lost sight of in relation to the cost. As a rule it is always better to stretch a campaign out.

Concretely that means generating a low volume of visitors per day and letting the campaign run longer instead. At the same time the significance of the analysis rises with the number of visitors bought, which should be taken into account as well. Bought traffic often delivers fewer conversions.

Beware of traffic advertising in iframes

Caution is advised especially with cheap and less well-known traffic websites. Not rarely, instead of your page a page with several iframes is promoted. Each of those iframes loads one campaign. The advantage for the publisher is that they can show one visitor several campaigns at once and so save costs.

Your page could be one of those iframes. The visibility of such iframes - and therefore the advertising effect - tends towards zero, of course. In web analytics tools the visits are nevertheless measured as normal.

To protect yourself against such dubious practices you can build a framebreaker into your website. A framebreaker is a small piece of JavaScript that prevents your page from being displayed inside a frame. A framebreaker destroys the frameset and makes sure only your own page is shown.

On eBesucher, pages with a framebreaker can be advertised in the surfbar and in click campaigns without problems, provided the framebreaker option is activated when creating the campaign. Through the framebreaker test you can determine how a page behaves inside a frameset.

Unique visitors vs. impressions

Offers such as "100,000 visits for just one euro" or "1,000 visits free" are problematic. Honestly, such offers sound tempting. The customer thinks: "even if I only receive 50,000 visitors, that is still a great deal" - and the trap has sprung. Why? Such offers lack, among other things, the distinction between unique visitors and impressions.

A unique visit means a visitor identified by their own IP address who may visit a website several times within a certain period. Repeated visits from that visitor are always counted as a single visit within that period.

With an impression or page impression, by contrast, any number of visits can be generated from one IP address. A visitor could simply refresh a website to generate several visits. The distinction can be made with online tools such as Google Analytics or Matomo.

Whoever buys impressions therefore has considerably less reach and a much smaller chance of a conversion. Impressions are not rarely sold as ad views, page views, views or hits. With such offers the whole package of the service has to be questioned critically.

Paid traffic offers should be transparent, or ideally be billed in unique visitors only. Anyone advertising on eBesucher can set an individual time interval for unique visitors with the IP suspension. That way you can determine that a visitor only opens a page every 60, 360 or 1,440 minutes.

Avoiding bot traffic

Did you know that, according to various industry estimates, more than half of global internet traffic is generated by bots? Less than half therefore goes back to humans. Anyone buying traffic from unknown sources risks a bot hiding behind the page view and the IP. Bots are not always easy to identify.

In every case the IP address of the visitors should be checked. If the visits delivered are predominantly users of a hosting, cloud or server provider, the traffic source has to be viewed critically. Bot traffic, just like a high bounce rate, counts as unwanted traffic and should be avoided for the sake of SEO.

Bounce rate and returning visits

Paid traffic is valuable when the visitors come back. If they do not, Google counts them as bounced. A high bounce rate is generally poison and should be avoided at all costs. For Google a bounced visitor means that visitor is not interested in the website. Google uses that information for the value of the page, and it can contribute to a worse placement in search.

A tip: whoever sources traffic through the eBesucher surfbar can make sure the visitors come back. With the help of the visitor session, an extremely low bounce rate can be achieved.

Anonymising the website referrer

Google does not necessarily like it when a website draws too much paid traffic. With advertising through Google Ads or the Google Display Network that is a different matter, of course. Not least for data protection reasons it is an advantage not to disclose the origin of the visitors.

When a visitor reaches a destination page through an ad network, that is transmitted through the HTTPS referrer. On eBesucher the referrer of website visitors is anonymised as a matter of principle - for every advertiser, at no extra cost and without you having to configure anything.

Making paid traffic pay for itself

The great art of online advertising lies in making paid traffic pay for itself. Whoever manages to earn more money with paid visitors than their campaign costs can scale their advertising up at will. Profits will rise in parallel with revenue - the dream of every webmaster.

Anyone hoping for a general solution to this will unfortunately be disappointed. The answer to the question is: every website and every product is individual and has to be promoted through an individual marketing mix.

Our tip: source your website traffic from different channels and analyse the visitor statistics continuously. It is usually very quick to see which measures are promising. The precondition for that is a clean separation of the sources through UTM parameters. The number of conversions should stand in relation to the investment early on.

Analysing website traffic with a landing page

Webmasters who identify and buy new traffic sources should always keep an eye on the statistics. To be able to judge the success of a new traffic source, simple landing pages are a good option alongside UTM parameters. A landing page is a simple HTML page that links to and therefore promotes the actual destination. The webmaster then simply has to put the number of visits on the landing page in relation to the clicks that happened through that page. A high click rate implies that the traffic source is to be rated positively.

Measuring website traffic

To determine the website traffic of your own site, web analytics tools are used. The best-known free tool is Google Analytics. Beyond that, Matomo (formerly Piwik) is another free option. Both tools offer many metrics and features for a detailed analysis.

In many cases, however, a webmaster wants to find out the metrics of someone else's site - for instance when judging the relevance of a backlink. To be able to assess the value of backlinks from other websites, webmasters need concrete statements about the traffic of those sites, since sites with poor metrics presumably provide poor or less relevant backlinks. The Domain Authority of the other domain serves as an additional reference point here.

For measurement, providers such as Similarweb, Ahrefs or Semrush offer suitable metrics. These are paid services, though, whose data rests on more or less accurate estimates. Larger websites often publish their own media data. In any case it is helpful to cross-check the data through different sources. You then get a very good insight into the performance of a website.