An Ode to the Page Referrer

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).

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