How do people arrive at your site?

A web analytics metric that I find extremely fascinating is page referrer, or the source of traffic to a certain page. What sort of traffic are you bringing into your site? Do people that come in from organic search on a search engine or through a social media post interact with a page differently? These questions and more can be answered with web analytics and they start with measuring page referrer. 

(Adobe, 2018) There can be several page referrer types that consist of social media, search engines, email, typed or bookmarked, and internal traffic coming from other pages within your site. Search engines can then be broken down further into paid and natural which allows you to view who’s coming in from a paid search ad and who organically found your page. It’s helpful to know how much traffic is coming from each page referrer type to get an understanding of where your brand can supplement their marketing efforts and focus on specific channels in their marketing strategy. If your brand is currently running a social media campaign but no one is visiting your site that way, you can make changes to the campaign’s images and copy or choose to not run that campaign at all since it’s not driving any traffic.

Any company that has an online presence and is tracking their efforts can find value in reporting on page referrers. (McKenna, 2014) A few years back, Groupon decided to conduct an experiment where they de-indexed themselves from Google so that their site wouldn’t be recognized by the search engine in order to determine the effects on organic search and direct traffic for six hours. Groupon was able to determine that desktop browsers tend to report organic search better while mobile browsers are less likely to be accurate. (McKenna, 2014) The brand was also able to determine that link referral campaigns (Groupon's links on other websites) could be another page referrer that loses some credit because their direct traffic did not experience as much of a decline as their organic search did. Looking at page referrers this way was extremely valuable for Groupon because it allowed the brand to get a clearer picture of how much traffic is actually attributable to each referrer type. Now they can take these findings and better optimize their efforts depending on which device visitors use to reach their website.

Another interesting benefit that measuring page referrers can provide is discovering possible partner opportunities that you might not have been aware of before. (Wallace, 2013) Checking the sources that your visitors come from could provide opportunities for partnerships, additional media placements and even SEO authority if the page referrers align with your brand’s overall goals. SEO Authority is a huge benefit to linking to appropriate page referrers and consists of several components. (Chapter 5: Trust, Authority & Rankings, n.d) The kinds of links your site receives as well as social media mentions and metrics that measure engagement (time on site, frequency, and page views per visit to name a few) all contribute to a site’s SEO Authority. Finding partnerships through your site’s page referrers will be able to increase your SEO Authority making search engines favor your site over others and allowing visitors to easily get to your web page.

As you can see, measuring page referrers for a website can provide valuable information that a brand can use to further improve their website capabilities. Page referrers can be broken up into several different types and allows a brand to see where they can focus their marketing efforts on. It can also shed some light on possible partnership opportunities by allowing a brand to see relevant pages and sites that are driving traffic for them that could lead to additional media placements and sponsorship opportunities down the road.

Adobe. (2018). Analytics Help and Reference. Retrieved January 21, 2018 from https://marketing.adobe.com/resources/help/en_US/reference/reports_search_engines.html

Chapter 5: Trust, Authority & Search Rankings. (n.d.). Search Engine Land. Retrieved January 21, 2018 from https://searchengineland.com/guide/seo/trust-authority-search-rankings

McKenna, G. (2014). Experiment shows up to 60% of "direct" traffic is actually organic search. Search Engine Land. Retrieved January 21, 2018 from https://searchengineland.com/60-direct-traffic-actually-seo-195415

Wallace, T. (2013). 4 ways to optimize your referral traffic. Mashable. Retrieved January 21, 2018 from http://mashable.com/2013/11/27/referrals-metrics/#7oJKjNpf5Pq5