Referrer: Friend or Foe?

After a website is up and running, the next stage is to increase the online presence. One way to strengthen a website’s online authority is through link building. Link building is creating a flow of links to navigate through a website and it is also having other websites link back to the website as well. If other websites are linking back to a website, especially around a specific topic, it will increase the authority of the website for that specific topic.

“Search engines use links to crawl the web; they will crawl the links between the individual pages on your website, and they will crawl the links between entire websites” (Source: Moogan.).

How Does Link Building Affect Web Analytics?

To track the success of any link building strategy, there is one metric to keep in mind: Referrer. “An ‘http referrer’, often simply referred to as the ‘referrer’, is any source online that drives visits and visitors to your website…Whenever someone visits your site, one of the pieces of information recorded is where that person came from.” (Source: Kyrin).


The referrer metric tells companies where and how visitors are finding the website. There is a good and bad side to link building. If a quality website with content related to the business links back to the site, that is a quality link. But, if the referring site has spam-like qualities and not related to the business at all, it can negatively affect link building efforts. Referrer is the parent metric, but a web analyst can also track the page referrer, visitor referrer, and session referrer. The sub metrics are more specific than the parent metric and track the referral link for a specific page, visitor or session. The referrer metrics fall under the visitor characteristic metric category. This metric allows you to character a visitor by how they found the website. Analyzing any trends on where majority of website visitors are coming from will help to uncover where the website is being found the most–and visitors are actually clicking through from.

How Referral Traffic Can Affect Your Business?

“Referral traffic is important to inbound marketers because it sends potentially qualified visitors to your website from trusted websites. This in turn gets your content in front of new people, giving your website the opportunity to convert that visitor into a lead and your sales team the opportunity to convert that lead into a new customer” (Source: Kiel). There are many ways to generate referral traffic–such as through social media connections, online directories related to the business, guest blogging and more–but implementing the right strategy will have the greatest impact and find the right, or most qualified, website visitors. “By analyzing where your traffic is coming from, you will get an understanding of what is working for your site from a marketing standpoint and which avenues may not currently be paying off. This will help you better allocate your digital marketing dollars and the time you invest in certain channels” (Source: Kyrin).

Comments

  1. Greer Johnson January 30, 2018 at 8:06 PM

    I think websites really rely on referral traffic because how do we stumble upon certain blog sites or news sources? Especially through social media, you can shorten your links and place them on your social page, and if your post is catchy, it will leave people to click. I'm sure you see a link, and shared with your friends, referral traffic. I think that is where most of the website traffic comes from and I'm glad you shared.

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