Referral traffic

Analytics

Referral traffic is a metric that you can track through google analytics to see the SEO performance of your website. By reflecting on these figures you can gain insights into how your website is performing in search engine directories and advance your digital marketing strategy. This post will explore what it is, how it works, and how to help you improve your metrics.

TRACK YOUR REFERRAL TRAFFIC

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Templates using this KPI
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Integrations using this KPI

What is referral traffic?

Referral traffic is defined as website hits that you get through other sites, in other words, users who come to your page through other websites without a google search. When visitors arrive on your site in this way, Google tracks the website traffic as referral data. This information can be collected in the form of UTM codes which tell website managers exactly how visitors reached your website, revealing the referral sources.

The foundation of all referral traffic is based on backlinks that are hosted on other sites and drive web traffic to your site without necessarily having anything to do with search traffic, which is more relevant to organic traffic; bookmarks and direct hits which are considered direct traffic; or algorithm performance to do with highly effective search engine optimization strategies. Referral traffic is important because it sends high-quality visitors to your site, bringing the potential to increase conversion rates. While referral traffic is not inherently based in SEO, it will help to boost your optimization and algorithm performance.

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How to calculate referral traffic

Referral traffic is a metric tracked in google analytics. You will be able to find a referral report and a list of sources, excluding those derived from paid advertising.

What is good referral traffic?

There is no solid rule when it comes to determining a high referral traffic score, however, anything other than 7% is considered excellent.

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What is bad referral traffic?

Referral traffic below the 7% may be considered weak. Referral traffic is an important metric to follow because those visitors typically represent highly engaged audience members with the potential to convert to sales.

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Referral traffic KPI examples & templates

Here are some templates :

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See this KPI in action here!

Google analytics report template

An awesome report with important metrics for your SEO strategy. Track your marketing efforts with KPIs like organic searches (Google search), single-page data, and audience demographics.

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Digital marketing report template

From SEO to social media platforms and PPC, this report gives you a good view of all your online marketing strategy metrics and overall online performance.

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SEO report template

Gather all your favorite SEO tools, from Google Analytics to SEMrush, Ahrefs, and way more into a single, awesome SEO report! With this report template, you can track all your SEO performance and keyword rankings in seconds.

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Referral traffic best practices

If you are not seeing the conversions you need and are looking to drive organic traffic, here are some tips to consider.

Social media marketing

Increase the outreach of your brand and post links to your content and website across social media platforms so that other sites will know about your page and eventually link to you. Increasing notoriety on social networks, especially for small businesses, allows you to build partnerships and increase pageviews.

Feature guest posts and bloggers

If you host a WordPress blog, consider featuring a unique piece of content on a periodic basis from influencers or other high-quality writers as guest bloggers. You can then share these posts in online forums, on LinkedIn, and in email marketing campaigns to get the content known in relevant circles, increasing the chance that other websites will link back to you.

Enhanced backlinking strategy

Ensure that you are building partnerships where you link to each other’s business. For small businesses, this can be helpful as you gain redirects from one another’s websites.

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