Web Analytics Tutorial

Lesson 2 – Where are My Visitors Coming From?

Referring Domains and Pages

Figure 1. The Referring Domains Report provides a list of web sites with pages that link to your site.

Referring domains are a good place to start when you are trying to analyze who is linking to your site. By starting at the domains level (rather than looking at specific pages) you can figure out which sites are sending you the most traffic. Some of these you may have link agreements or other business relationships with. Many are likely to be search engines and portal sites. Often you may discover a significant amount of your traffic comes from sites you didn’t even know about. By learning this information you can cultivate new relationships with these sites to help ensure that they bring more and better traffic to your site. Or you may decide that you don’t want to be affiliated with a referring domain and ask the site to remove any links.

Figure 1 shows the number of Hits, Pages and Downloads for the top domains. In Lesson 1, we discussed each of these units in general. In this context these counts are for the item that was requested from your web site. Usually this is a page, so Hits and Pages are often about the same. When other sites have direct links to downloads on your site, then the ‘visitor’ who downloaded the item will register a Download hit, rather than a Page hit. Sometimes, you will have a few hits in your report that are neither Downloads nor Pages. This often means that another site is including graphics from your site in their pages. The ‘visitor’ may not even know that the graphics are from your site. Summary provides the Hijacking Report to help you diagnose this type of use. This is covered in more depth in Lesson 11 - Site and Server Diagnostics.

Qualifying Domains on Recent Hits

Figure 2. Recent Hit information in the Referring Domains Report gives a present value of referring sites.

All reports in Summary provide statistics for the entire period covered by your log files. If you have two years of data in Summary, then the Referring Domain with the most hits could still be one that was popular a year ago. To help understand the state of your web site in the present, Summary provides columns of “Recent Hits.” In Figure 2, you can see that some domains would be ranked higher in total historical hits than they are when sorted by Recent Hits. The Recent Hits value is usually a count of hits in the past two to three weeks. By comparing this short period to the historical total, you can see changes in trends as they are happening. This can be invaluable in helping you stay on top of changes in your traffic and allowing you to respond quickly to a fluctuating market place.

Figure 3. The quality of referring domains can be determined by metrics related to qualities of visits.

Qualifying Domains on Other Metrics

The number of hits generated by a referrer may be interesting, but may not be the most important thing you want a referrer to produce. Most web sites have specific goals and as a web site marketer you want to know whether the site is meeting those goals and which referrers are sending you visitors that achieve those goals. One of the simplest qualities might be Pages, rather than hits, especially if your web site is content driven or funded by advertising. If you are publishing software or other download-able content, Downloads is an important metric to follow. Figure 3 introduces additional quantities that could help determine the quality of a referrer. Average Steps tells you,on average, how many non-graphic hits each visitor from that referring domain had as they navigated through your site. This can be especially important when you are delivering advertising, as it tells you how many potential impressions each visit from a given referrer had.

Sometimes you may have goals that are specific to your site, such as visitors who make it to the checkout page. For example, assume the site in Figure 3 sells widgets. The referring domain report shows that widgetsource.com sends a lot of visitors. Now, perhaps the site has been designed to look like the computer screens from Star Trek. You will see that the site also receives a lot of hits from the startrektrivia.co.uk site. However, if Summary has been configured to track the receipt page from the checkout system as a Goal, then the widgetsource.com site shows many goals were reached within their referrers’ visits, while startrektrivia.com shows very few. Using qualities like these can vastly improve the value of your metrics. Goals are an important concept in advanced analytics, so all of Lesson 9 - Incorporating Business Goals has been devoted to them.

Figure 4. The Referrer Report shows individual pages that send visitors to your site.

Referring Pages

Once you know which sites are sending you visitors, you will probably want to know what pages on those sites link to yours. When you click on any of the Referring Domains listed in the Referring Domains Report, Summary will show you a list of selected referrers, pages on sites within that domain that link to your site. This Selected Referrer Report, is similar to the Referrer Report in Figure 4. From either of these reports you can rank specific pages on referring web sites based on criteria such as hits, downloads, pages, etc.