Get to Know Your Google Analytics Report: Referrals

Data analysis is a critical component of digital marketing. Many successful companies exert great effort to measure if their marketing efforts are delivering the results they seek. How do in-house and agency marketers measure their KPIs (key performance indicators)? One of the most useful tools at the disposal of marketers is Google Analytics. We at D4 Advanced Media use Google Analytics to measure things like sessions, users, pageviews, traffic sources and more. In this article we take a closer look at what it take to become a Google Analytics expert and the value of the Referrals Report.

How Can Google Analytics Help My Digital Marketing Efforts?

It’s no secret that in order for a business to thrive in the digital world, steps need to be taken to design website structure and content that conform to Google’s best practices.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of D4 Advanced Media’s specialties. Some aspects of internet marketing require cumulative knowledge that gets gained over decades. We have that knowledge, but when it comes to search engine optimization, the target is always moving. We know we want our clients’ websites to appear as close to position one in Google’s SERP (search engine results page) when prospective customers type a wide variety of keywords into the search engine. How we get our clients onto page one and to the top of that page requires constant adaptation and technique exploration.

We use two primary resources to help us assess if our SEO efforts are delivering the results we seek: SEMrush and Google Analytics.

Among other things, we use SEMrush to analyze how our efforts influence the position of keyword rankings that are relevant to the keyword campaigns we conduct for clients.

We use Google Analytics to determine our clients’ audiences, how they acquired those audiences, how those audiences interacted with the sites and if site-specific goals such as newsletter sign-ups are being achieved.

Our digital marketing experts highly recommend the Google Analytics Academy for anyone who wishes to better understand opportunities to collect data and analyze it. Google Analytics is a key component in how we grow our clients’ businesses.

Google Analytics & Internet Marketing Are Huge. Where Do I Start?

One of the functions of Google Analytics that we find especially helpful is the Referrals Report. Referral traffic refers to the users that arrive on a website via a link from a referring website. These referral links are also known as backlinks.

Some companies spend a great deal of time trying to obtain referral links from websites that draw a lot of traffic and that overlap in expertise or subject matter. For example, a wine blog would likely benefit from a referral link by foodandwine.com. The two sites discuss similar subjects and users that frequent foodandwine.com are more likely to arrive at wineblog.com if foodandwine.com includes a referral link to wineblog.com.

Some of the digital marketer’s goals are to:

• Determine which sites are linking to clients’ sites
• Assess the quality of the referring sites
• Determine on which pages referred users are landing
• Develop calls to action on those landing pages that result in conversions

The following excerpt is straight from the Google Analytics Academy’s Google Analytics for Beginner’s course.

“Referrals Report

If you want to view your traffic organized by which sites have linked to yours, you can look at the “Referrals” report.

You can even click into individual referrals to see which specific web pages link back to your site. If you want to understand which specific pages of your site are being linked to, you can add a secondary dimension of “landing page” to the report. This will show you which external sites are sending traffic to each of your specific pages, and potentially offer you a source of new advertising partnerships with those referring websites.”

D4 Offers Different Packages for Different Needs

D4 Advanced Media analyzes Google Analytics reports for a number of our clients. We provide our SEO clients with detailed reports generated from Google Analytics and SEMrush at the beginning of every month. We also interpret the data in the reports and explain it to our clients in an easy to understand way. No one likes getting bogged down with marketing jargon!

If a full SEO package isn’t what you’re looking for, no sweat. We also offer traffic and keyword-position reporting independent of search engine optimization.