A
referrer is a generic term that is used to describe the source of traffic to a
page or visit and can be broken down into a few sub categories of referrers
such as page referrer, session referrer, and visitor referrer. In this post
we’re going to focus on the page referrer, as it is one of the metrics that I
personally love to look at and analyze.
So
what IS a page referrer?
When you visit a web page, analytics will report the last page that you viewed before clicking over to the current page that you are viewing, i.e. what page “referred” you to the current page. A page referrer is also known as the “referrer URL” or a “referrer string” (Sullivan, 2010).
When you visit a web page, analytics will report the last page that you viewed before clicking over to the current page that you are viewing, i.e. what page “referred” you to the current page. A page referrer is also known as the “referrer URL” or a “referrer string” (Sullivan, 2010).
Referrer
logs can help you analyze the traffic to your site and can provide you data on
how exactly they are coming to your site. Some of the information you can view
includes:
- Which search engines have brought you traffic;
- What keywords were used to find your site;
- Top referring sites.
This
is useful with SEO has search engine positioning strategies begin with a simple
keyword phrase, and by looking in to what keywords customers were using to be referred
to your site, it can help you define what words you could integrate in part of
your SEO campaigns (Nobles, 2005).
So
let’s look at some of the types of referrer logs we mentioned above.
Which search engines
have brought you traffic.
Looking
at what search engines brought you to a specific page is important to look at
cause it can help you decide where to put some of your media buys. In the
instance of this site, you can see that Google is the top referring search
engine.
What keywords were used
to find your site.
I
love this aspect of page referrers because you can see what keywords were used
to bring people to your site, or what words people searched to find your site.
These
metrics can be used to help influence SEO and AdWords campaigns. From the
previous screen shot you can see that Google was search engine with the highest
number of referrer visits, so focusing AdWords campaigns to Google using the
above keywords would be useful in formulizing a successful SEO campaign.
Top Referring Sites.
Want
to know which outside sources are sending traffic to your site? Looking at the
top referring sites will give you that information.
Why
is looking at this data important? Maybe you didn’t know that fbi.gov was
sending you a lot of traffic. By seeing this information it can now help you
possibly form a partnership you didn’t know was possible or even form some link
and content sharing opportunities.
So,
as you can see, the page referrer metric is an important one to look at. It can
help you identify potential partnerships and linking opportunities, help you
establish keywords you could incorporate in to your SEO strategy, and can also
assist in informing your company as to which search engines they should focus
their search campaigns on. Overall, page referrers help you determine how and
why people are coming to your site. Adding on to all the other metrics you can
track, you can get a better picture of your customer.
Source:
Nobles,
R. (2005). Use referrer logs to analyze your search engine traffic. Search
Engine Workshops. Retrieved from http://www.searchengineworkshops.com/articles/traffic.html
Sullivan,
D. (2010, May 25). The Death of Web Analytics? An Ode to the Threatened
Referrer. Search Engine Land. Retrieved from http://searchengineland.com/the-death-of-web-analytics-an-ode-to-the-referrer-42875
