Web Analytics Tutorial

Lesson 2 – Where are My Visitors Coming From?

Visits Without Referrer Data

Not all visitors arriving at your site provide referrer information. Usually these non-referred visits are from users who selected a bookmark or favorites entry in their browser or who typed in your URL directly. Perhaps you have advertisements hosted on another site that are delivered through a system producing dynamic content to include your ad. In such a case, each referrer is a unique page, so you cannot look at what pages are sending you visitors. Or, you might have an email marketing campaign with a link in it to bring visitors into your site. But email clients do not include any referrer, so you cannot know from the referrer reports where your visitors found out about you. Or maybe your visitors are getting your URL from advertisements or marketing materials in other media.

You can work around such problems by using special URLs. Like traditional campaigns where you offer a special or incentive in response to an advertisement to track responses, you can use specific web pages on your site, such as <http://www.mysite.com/ad001.html> or <http://ww.mysite.com/special> to track responses to advertisements or other campaigns you launch on the Internet. However, these URLs can often be harder for users to remember (especially the first kind) and don’t provide the consistency that is often necessary to get people to recognize your brand.

Another cause of visits without referring URLs is spiders or robots. These are automated programs that follow web site links to gather information. They may be used to index your site for a search engine, to find email addresses for unsolicited email lists, or to copy your site for off-line storage. In most cases robots won’t bother providing referrer information. You can configure Summary to exclude robot visits from your statistics if you want to remove this kind of traffic.

Further Study

We’ve only touched on some of the reports that Summary produces from referrer information. You can investigate more of them from the menu in your copy of Summary, under the Referrers section. Each report listed includes tabs for other related reports. For example, the Refers To and Referred From reports provide insightful information about what visitors from given sites are looking for or where visitors to give pages came from. These and the other detailed reports are useful for answering questions that arise once you start looking at the data.