Referral Traffic: Learning where your website visitors come from

Referral traffic is Google’s method of reporting visits that came to your site from sources outside of its search engine.  When someone clicks on a hyperlink to go to a new page on a different website, Google Analytics tracks the click as a referral visit to the second site.  In other words, a referral is like a recommendation from one website to another.  Referral traffic comes from all across the web.  If you have a website that is optimized for quality content, you should see a healthy mixture of social, paid, and organic traffic.  Google Anayltics helps you view these referrals and learn how customers are finding your website as well as what they do once they get there. 

Google finds referral traffic to be beneficial because it adds legitimacy or trust flow to a website.  Trust Flow is a number from 0 – 100 that shows how trustworthy a site is based on how many other trustworthy sites point back to it.  For reference, Mashable has a trust flow of 77 where a smaller, personal blog may only be in the 20’s.  However, the more sites link back to the blog, that trust flow will begins to rise along with the search engine ranking.  More trust, the more Google’s algorithm views a trust as a legit source. 

Marketers should particularly be interested in referral traffic because it can be a strong indicator of which external sources are most valuable in helping your business achieve its goals.  For example, marketers may take a look at their referral traffic coming from the brand’s Facebook page to determine if the content they are posting on Facebook is actually bringing additional traffic to the brand’s website or if their time is better spent elsewhere.

But exactly how is referral traffic tracked?  According to Richard Bashara, referral traffic is tracked and passed via the HTTP referrer.  This refer identifies where a user came from and where they are currently on your site.  When someone click on a link to your site, the browser sends a request to your server.  The request includes a field with data about the last place the person visited Google Analytics then captures this data and reports it to you as a referral domain.

Now that you understand what referral traffic is, I encourage you to take a look at your referral traffic.  Does it seem low?  Is there room for improvement?  The good news is there are several, fairly easy, things you can do to increase your website’s referral traffic and increase your search engine ranking in the process, including:

• Linking back to your website from your brand’s social media sites.  According to new data, Facebook surpassed Google as the leading source of referral traffic in June and July of 2015. (Beck, 2015).  Furthermore, as of December 2014, 31.24% of all referral traffic was from social media, compared to only 22.71% the previous year. 
• Guest blogging on other industry blogs.  Write content in your industry niche and link back to your brand’s website or other content that is relevant to the topic at hand.
• Strategically comment on blogs.  Position yourself as a thought-leader.  Add additional value to other industry blogs by sharing your knowledge and linking back to your brand’s website where viewers can read more on the particular topic or learn how your solutions can benefit them. 
• Leverage partner sites.  Industry trade-shows and conferences will usually allow you to advertise your company’s website when sponsoring an event or in exchange for placing a URL on your website as well.  Take advantage of these opportunities if it makes sense to do so.

I hope this blog post helps you navigate and increase your website’s referral traffic.  However, before I leave, I wanted to include a quick, 6 minute video from Kissmetrics that takes a deeper dive into referral traffic.  I believe this video will further help educate you on the somewhat complex topic of referral traffic.