Web Analytics Tutorial

Lesson 2 – Where are My Visitors Coming From?

Introduction

One of the keys to marketing, whether on the web or in traditional media, is knowing your customers. It’s the core of Customer Relationship Management. It’s integral to customer service. Collecting and mining customer information has become the holy grail of modern marketing technologies. One of the most common questions raised by marketing managers and business owners is, “Where are my customers coming from?” Even if you aren’t very concerned with marketing, it’s still important to know how your visitors found you.

In the traditional media, we use promotions and referral programs to try to track which ads or resources bring in customers. We may also use customer surveys to ask the customers themselves. All of these can provide some information, but the data is fraught with inconsistencies and is of limited value. Fortunately, with the web, we are given that information for almost every hit. Whenever you click on a link on a website, your browser sends a ’referrer’ to the new site telling it where the link was that brought you there. Using web analytics, we can collect, summarize and, in places, evaluate this data for deeper significance.

Referrer information is collected by your web server when a visitor clicks on a link that brings her to a page on your site. Because referrer data is sent for every click, even pages on your own site send you referrer information. In this lesson we will only be talking about referrers from outside your site. Referrer information internal to your site is useful mainly for path analysis and finding broken links, covered separately in Lesson 7 - Determining Visitor Behavior and Lesson 11 - Site and Server Diagnostics, respectively.

Links on other web sites are termed ‘static referrers’ and are the easiest to comprehend. You can find out which sites and which pages are sending traffic and can follow the links in reverse to see those pages, because the pages are still on the web. Dynamic referrers are links from content that may no longer exist by the time you see the report. This could be a news story (that only exists on the news site for a day or a week), an email campaign, or a search engine listing.

Finally, it is possible for users to find your site without providing referrer information, either by following a bookmark or favorites listing or by typing the URL into their browsers. While these hits contain no referrer information they are still valuable and you can use some tricks, covered in the final section of this lesson, to gather more information about them.