Does Google Analytics Use Referral Links?
Google Analytics provides website administrators with the ability to monitor site performance using various types of measurement. This includes seeing how many visits and hits a site receives each day, seeing which site pages are receiving traffic and seeing where the traffic is coming from. The part of Google Analytics where you can monitor traffic includes information about referral links that you can use to see which sites are sending traffic to your site.
Other People Are Reading
-
Site Profiles
-
When you log into Google Analytics, you're presented with a list of profiles for the sites you've added to your account for tracking. You can view traffic source information for any of these sites. By clicking a link to one of your account sites or choosing it from the View Reports drop-down menu, you can see the visits your site has received over the past month in graphical form, along with links to various other measurements for the site, including traffic sources.
Traffic Sources
-
The traffic sources section for a Google Analytics site appears in the main interface for the site profile. On the site's main page, you can see a breakdown of the percentage of site traffic coming from both search engines and referring sites; this information is also presented in a pie chart on the page. Below the pie chart is a list of the top traffic sources for the site.
-
Traffic Report
-
To see detailed data about the traffic sources for a site, you can click on the "view full report" link in the Top Traffic Sources section in the site profile overview page. Depending on your settings, you may need to adjust the number of rows displayed at once by choosing an option from the "Show rows" drop-down list. The list presents the website address of each traffic source along with the number of visits from that source and additional information about the time each visit lasted. The traffic report list includes both search engines and referral links.
Referrers
-
When browsing the list of traffic sources in a Google Analytics account, you can immediately identify which records are for referral links by looking for the text "/referral" immediately after the website addresses listed. Although the list indicates each referrer your site received traffic from, it only lists the top-level site address rather than specific pages. This means that you can see which websites have linked to your site, but not the specific pages on those websites that link to your site. By clicking one of the items in the Source/Medium list, you can see further details for a particular referrer, including a graphical representation of your site's visits from that referrer.
-
References
Resources
- Photo Credit Comstock/Comstock/Getty Images
