Online marketing: new findings in web traffic report
Where does most website traffic come from? SimilarWeb’s 2016 Global Search Marketing Report analyzes the origin of desktop web traffic, revealing useful insights for online marketing.
Paid Search
In paid search, advertisers pay search engines to display their listing at the top of search results. Paid search is also referred to as sponsored search. Depending on the search engine, paid search listings may be clearly labelled as “sponsored” or they may blend in with organic results.
Brazil, India and France report the highest rates of paid search traffic at 4.14%, 3.75% and 3.04%, respectively. In the United States 1.84% of website hits are from paid search traffic, just under the global average of about 2%.
Source: SimilarWeb Global Search Marketing Report 2016
Display Advertising
Display advertising utilizes banners featured directly on a website. The banner may appear horizontally across the screen or vertically on a side panel. While paid search relies on text content, display advertising utilizes images, audio and/or video in addition to text.
About 0.5% of total traffic comes from display ads in the U.S., Japan and Western Europe. Brazil and India lead the highest display ad traffic rates at 3.79% and 4.94%.
What’s most important in online marketing?
The most significant finding in SimilarWeb’s report is the importance of good search results. Search traffic accounted for 38.98% of website hits to shopping sites (in which 3.73% was paid search and 35.88% organic). Direct traffic was close behind at 35.88%, and referrals at 19.34%.
Interestingly, traffic stemming from social networks outranked display ads by a longshot. Social network traffic contributed to 3.91% of website hits, while display ads only 1.32%. Social network traffic also outperformed paid search traffic by 0.18%.
Source: SimilarWeb Global Search Marketing Report 2016
3 Tips for online marketing strategies
Sifting through the numbers, there are several main points to bear in mind. For more about how your website can benefit from this new information, please contact IPiece Websites.
- Never underestimate the power of a quality product and service. Even in the digital age, returning clients and customer referrals are your most valuable online marketing tools. Together, direct traffic and referrals amounted to 55.22% of all searches– more than all other categories combined.
- Your website’s search ranking is still incredibly important. Traffic from search results account for double the traffic from referrals. Improving your search ranking will most likely improve business.
- Remember, Tweets are for free. Social networks generated nearly as many hits as paid search and display advertising combined. As social network audiences are concentrated groups, often returning customers, a Facebook post could be way more meaningful than a pop-up ad.