Web Analytics Tutorial

Lesson 2 – Where are My Visitors Coming From?

Static and Dynamic Referrers

Static referrers are pages on other web sites that link to your site. They are termed ‘static’ because they will continue to exist for a relatively long time; that is, when you read the report, you can follow the links to see the pages that sent you visitors. The static referrers themselves can be valued by the various metrics discussed in the last section: Hits, Recent Hits, Pages, Downloads, Average Stpes, Value, Goals, etc. Because of their semi-permanent nature, static referrers are easy to investigate. Often, looking at the pages and analyzing the content of them can lead to more information than you can get from just the link.

Not all referrers are available on the web by the time you get to reading your reports. This is especially true when looking at historical data, but can even be the case for pages or links that are a day or week old. In such instances, you must either stay on top of your reports to find the resource while it is still around, or analyze the link itself for the information you want.

News Listings

Some dynamic referrers are just web pages that change rapidly. The most common example of this is a news story that links to your site. For example, a trade magazine may run a story on their home page about your site. For the day, your site gets hits from the trade magazine’s home page. But they post new stories on the home page every day so the next day your story and link are no longer there.

Figure 5. Using the Hits Over Time chart in the Referrer Report you can see when active referral events occurred at specific referring sites.

Usually the best solution for this is to recognize news sites and view or even save the page when it is posted. The Referrer Report includes a column Hits Over Time, as in Figure 5. By looking for spikes on this graph you can see when events occurred that caused a large amount of traffic to be sent to your site. Each bar in the chart represents a single day, with the right-most being the last date in the log files. Weekend days are marked in blue to show weeks.

You can’t always stay on top of these referrers and there will be times when the resource is gone before you even see the report. In this case you can often search most news sites for archives of stories. If you do find the archive, view it and, possibly, save it for later reference. If the archived story still has a link to your site, then you can click the link to register a referrer in your logs from the archive for future reference.

Search Engines

When visitors follow a link from a search engine to your site, it’s very unlikely that you’ll ever see the page they saw that linked to your site. This is because search engine indexes get changed regularly and because the logic the engines use gets altered as well. However, if you know the terms the visitor searched for you will often be able to see your listing. More importantly, knowing what terms users are finding your site with can help you better understand what they are looking for and improve your site to make it easier for them to find the right content (or for search engines to list you under the appropriate keywords.)

Figure 6. By inspecting each search phrase and the engines it was used at you can better understand what visitors are looking for at your site.

Fortunately, almost all search engines include the search phrase in the referrer information when a user follows a link to your site. Using web analytics we can analyze the phrase and individual words. Figure 6 is the Search Engine by Search Phrases Report, which details which phrases were used to find your site and at which engines those searches were performed.

In addition to knowing what your visitors are looking for and acting on that, you also want to make sure potential visitors can find your site when searching for relevant topics. Finding the right keywords, making your site search-engine friendly, and improving your ranking incorporate a whole separate science of web marketing called Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO is dependent, however, on the feedback you get in your Search Engine reports, so we have devoted a whole separate lesson to the topic. For more information, see Lesson 3 - Search Engines.