The Importance of Referrer Metrics

One question I believe all website owners can come to agreement on is, “where is my website traffic coming from?” Referrer metrics look to help answer that question. A referrer is the source of traffic that is leading people to your website or webpage. (Reed College of Media, 2018) Whether your visits are derived from social media accounts such as Facebook and Twitter, or from banner ads and links on other webpages with similar audiences, narrowing down exactly where these visits and clicks are coming from is extremely important to any website owner.

As of November 2016, Facebook and Google alone drove nearly 80 percent of external traffic to digital publishers in Parse.ly’s network. (VanNest, 2016) Some of you may be thinking, “that’s great—their websites are getting noticed and website traffic is coming in from other sources besides generic searches via search engines!” Which yes, may be partially correct, however when there are drastic changes in Facebook (which happens pretty frequently) the amount of referrals can be completely thrown off and from there, lead to a plummet in a website’s conversion rates. In fact, referral reports are the first place people often look when they encounter unexpected spikes in website traffic. (Wallace, 2013)

To help better monitor exactly where their referrals are coming from, Parse.ly created their own analytic dashboard called a Referrer Dashboard. This dashboard precisely generates the exact amount of referrals from each social media outlet. Companies who use this tool will now not only have the ability to track their referrals from this toll, but know exactly where and when to post advertisements and links in order to effectively drive more traffic to their website.

Another example of a company relying on referrer metrics is PureWow, a female-focused content website that consists of a variety of lifestyle blogs. According to PureWow’s Director of Marketing, Alexis Anderson, “PureWow sees incredible visitor quality from Pinterest, in terms of depth of visit, engagement and consistently low bounce rate.” When PureWow noticed an extreme spike in referrals from Pinterest, they instantly knew that they had to make some modifications to their editorials and design strategy. (Wallace, 2013) Having referrer metrics at their fingertips not only gave PureWow the ability to notice where extreme plummets in visits were stemming from, but also insight on where to fix the issue.

Understanding the social media outlets your visits are being referred from is important, but understanding your audience is equally as important when thinking about these metrics in particular.

When megabrand makeup line L’Oréal thought about how to generate more visits to their e-commerce website, they took into consideration their audience. Khoi Truong, Director of Media & Analytics at L’Oréal in Montreal, Canada quoted, “some customers that apply makeup have other type of activities; they travel, they do yoga.” (Google, 2015)

By narrowing down what type of interests their audience had, Khoi was able to determine other brands that had a similar audience, allowing him to engage non-competitive brands to place banner ads (for example) on their websites for L’Oréal makeup. Furthermore, Khoi used Google Analytics to track exactly how many visits were being derived from each of the websites that he placed advertisements on for his own brand.

Although investing time and capital into tools that can help collect and analyze referrer metrics isn’t a “fix all” to a high amount of bounce rates, it does give you the information to more effectively market your website and products. By understanding your demographic audience and exactly where your visits are being derived from, you have the power to not only increase brand awareness in the most efficient manner but also closely monitor your visits to ensure random decrease in visits does not occur.

References

Google Inc. (2015). L’Oreal Doubles Anticipated Revenue with Analytics 360 and DoubleClick Bid Manager. Google Analytics. Retrieved from https://www.google.com/analytics/success-stories/#?modal_active=ss-yt-euBHYmOGuN4

Reed College of Media. (2018). IMC 642, Lesson 1. Retrieved January 20, 2018 from https://ecampus.wvu.edu/webapps/blackboard/execute/displayLearningUnit?course_id=_97081_1&content_id=_4434991_1&framesetWrapped=true

VanNest, A. (2016, December 14). Where Is Your Site Traffic Coming From? Retrieved from https://blog.parse.ly/post/5194/referral-traffic/

Wallace, T. (2013, November 27). 4 Ways to Optimize Your Referral Traffic. Retrieved from http://mashable.com/2013/11/27/referrals-metrics/#wIPDbMuh5PqU