Discover traffic channels sending traffic to any website. Reveal a site's traffic acquisition strategy and find ways to grow your business.

Traffic Channels

Similarweb marketing channel data and insights can help you focus your strategic efforts to acquire more traffic and build brand awareness.

Marketing Traffic Channels Overview and Use Cases:

Direct: Traffic sent from users that entered a URL into a browser, used saved bookmarks, or clicked a direct link from outside the browser (such as on Microsoft Word or an app).

  • Direct traffic often comes from visitors with an awareness of, or affinity for a given site. Thus, visitors from direct channels are likely to be among the website's most loyal and engaged users. Use this metric to assess a website’s brand strength, both awareness and demand.

Referrals: Traffic sent from one website to another, through a direct link. This kind of traffic includes affiliates, content partners, and traffic from direct media buying or news coverage.

  • A website that receives a large amount of traffic from Referrals is likely to have a strong affiliate strategy or receive significant media coverage. Drill into the list of Referrals to understand the type of partnerships the website maintains.

Organic Search: Traffic sent via organic, non-paid results on search engines such as Google or Bing (SEO).

  • A website that generates a large amount of traffic from Organic Search is optimizing for top ranks in search results. These visits are often from high-intent users, with notably higher engagement rates compared to the site average.

    View the list of organic keywords to the website in the SEO module to understand the split between branded keywords (often considered as “direct” traffic) vs. non-branded keywords.

Paid Search: Traffic sent from paid search ads on a search engine such as Google or Bing (SEM & PPC).

  • A website that generates a large amount of traffic from Paid Search is spending advertising budgets to increase brand awareness and target relevant audiences.

    Paid Search campaigns are often targeted at high-intent users and can result in higher conversion rates. Paid Search can also indicate an advertiser's ability to optimize a campaign’s KPIs (ad impressions, clicks, conversions, etc.).

    View the list of paid keywords in the and search ads in the Paid Search module to understand a website’s product focus and competitive messaging.

Email: Traffic sent from web-based email clients such as Gmail. Email traffic comes from the URL of a web-based email client. So, if the referring domain is gmail.com, for example, we would be able to categorize that as email traffic.

  • A website that receives a large amount of traffic from email is likely to have a large loyal customer base that engages via an owned mailing list.

Display Traffic: Traffic sent from Display and Video ads via a known ad-serving platform (i.e. GDN, Doubleclick).

  • A website that generates a large amount of traffic from Display ads is spending advertising budgets to increase brand awareness and attract a relevant audience.

    View the list of publishers and creatives galleries to understand a website’s targeting methods, product focus, and competitive messaging.

Social: Traffic sent from social media sites such as Facebook or Reddit (organic and paid), including direct media buying from Facebook.

  • Visits from Social are considered to be easily influenced (as a result of a viral article, meme, image, etc.). Thus, a website that generates high and consistent traffic from Social is likely to have a loyal community of users.

    View the list of social domains to understand the websites’ core communities.

Additional Resources

For more information on Similarweb Marketing Channels insights, visit Marketing Channels Overview.

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