In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to find this information with Independent Analytics and some tips for leveraging these insights to gain more traffic.
Inside the analytics dashboard, click on the Referrers menu item in the navigation bar.
On this page, you’ll find all the sites that have sent you traffic, sorted by the number of views they’ve sent you.
Each referrer also includes a type, such as Search or Social. There is one row labeled “Direct” and this includes all visitors that arrived at your site directly rather than being referred by another website (more info on that here).
Now that you know where to find this info, let’s talk about how to best use it.
There are a few simple ways to take action with this data and grow your site.
The first thing you’ll discover is your top traffic sources. If you aren’t already investing heavily in your top traffic sources, this is a great way to boost your traffic. For instance, if you find Google is sending you a lot of traffic but you haven’t done that much optimization, this would be a great time to work more on your site’s SEO.
This is the opposite of that last tactic. If you’ve been working hard on an acquisition channel and find out that it’s barely sending any traffic, it’s probably a good idea to cut your losses and drop that channel.
There will be some referrers that you haven’t worked on but show promise. For example, maybe you are getting visits from Facebook but you don’t even have a Facebook page. That could be a good sign for you to get more involved on that platform.
You may also find websites sending you traffic that you’ve never even heard of. You can do a Google search for these sites along with your brand name to find out where they mentioned you. They might be a good partner to signup as an affiliate or connect with for other marketing collaborations.
With these strategies, you can take the referrer analytics and extract powerful insights that will drive business growth.
