Website Statistics Report: Referrer Visits

Overview

The Referrers Report shows all the external links to your site and the page they link to and therefore is a very powerful tool in analysing where your website visitors are coming from.

Each “Referrer” is shown with the referring URL and the title of the page on your website that it links to.

For example:

> http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/5281046.stm
> Links to European Journal of Clinical Nutrition


You can even click on the URL of the referrer and are taken to the referring page so you can see why there is a link to your website there.

Search Engines can also be picked up in this report although we try to remove the main protagonists, Google, MSN, Yahoo etc, as they are catered for in the “Search Engine” report.

Also shown is the number of visitors that have come through to your website from each referrer making this is a very powerful way to track advertising campaigns and affiliate linking schemes you are involved in.

Remember though if you are using this to track success of an advertising campaign to ensure that your log size is sufficient to hold enough data to correctly monitor the campaign.

Report Options

As with most reports you can choose the date range that this report runs. If you begin a new advertising or affiliate linking program to increase your websites traffic use the date feature to step back to a time period before the work was carried out to determine if your enhancements are successful.

There is also a printer friendly version which is available by clicking the icon in the top right of the report.

How this Report Works with the Log

Log size is very important to this report as each log record represents the data for one session. If your log is full you will be losing the oldest record and therefore the oldest referrer with each new visitor so increasing the log size will allow you to store more data and analyse trends further back in time.

To understand how to get best use of this report read Managing Website Session Log help document.

Optimising your site for this Report

This report requires no special treatment to get the best out of it other than the standard bullet points of …

• Ensure that the tracking code is placed on every page of your site
• Ensure that your log is as big as possible

It is also good to ensure that your <title> tags are well planned. See the Popular Pages optimising section for more information.