Google Analytics - Referring Sites

The Referring Sites report is the next in the series of Traffic Sources reports. This report essentially provides details on the different domains from which visitors have followed a link to your site. This includes other websites and search engines (they are websites after all). As opposed to the "Direct Traffic" report, this one contains quite a bit of valuable data. Here's what the basic report looks like:

The default view provides you with a table of the following pieces of data:

• Source
• Visits
• Pages/Visit
• Avg. Time on Site
• % New Visits
• Bounce Rate

The 'Segment:' drop-down is present on this report, which means that you can select an item in the list to drill down on various areas of segmentation (the list of segments has already been posted in this blog, so I won't bother repeating each item). Some of the segmentation choices are quite useful. For example, you can segment by "Landing page" to see which pages of your site are linked to and are receiving the most referral traffic. However, some of the segments aren't the most relevant, and make more sense in their own reports, such as the Browser Capabilities or the Geographical location items.

What I like about this report is that it provides you with a very quick snapshot of where your most valuable links are placed. It's the perfect answer to the famous quote by John Wanamaker: "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half".

For example, I may have sponsored some ads or links on various sites, and perhaps the links have generated some good traffic and business - the campaign has been successful. Does that means that I'll renew all the links, to keep it running successfully?

Well, with the Referring Sites report you can sort out your most productive links from the rest. This is done using the "Goal Conversions" tab. While the Site Usage report may seem to indicate that a certain site is worthwhile because it's sending decent traffic, the Conversion data may present an entirely different story. For example, the top 5 sites sending traffic to mine all have a 0% conversion rate, and yet the highest converting site sends such little traffic that it doesn't even appear in the top 25 referring sites! This is due to the different nature of the visitors coming from the different sites, but either way it's great data to have. When it comes time to renew my links, I'll know that I don't necessarily need to keep spending money on the highest trafficked sites - I need to spend on the sites that send the most qualified visitors to mine.

As mentioned in another tutorial, Google Analytics does not report on the exact referring URL by default, only the domain. If you need the information on how to capture full referring URLs, feel free to drop a comment below. Or, if you have anything to add, leave a comment as well!