The Referring Sites Report on Google Analytics is helpful to those trying to determine the effectiveness of the links they have posted on other pages, be they banner ads or the existence of non-paid referrals.

Basically the information presented shows you what sites visitors are using to get to yours, this will help determine if the links you’ve placed on other sites are actually providing a return on investment by driving traffic to your site. For example, if you’ve placed an advertisement on a certain page, you would hope that this page would be a star player on your referring sites report. If not, perhaps you should consider placing your ads elsewhere.

But not only can you see the traffic volumes from referring sites, you can also gain insights into visit quality using the standard Google Analytics metrics: Pages/Visit, Avg. Time on Site, % New Visits and Bounce Rate.

By clicking on each referrer you can see the referral path (actual page on that website) they came in on. By changing the dimension to landing page you can see what page of yours they landed on.  This should help add a bit of transparency to the report.

The Referring Sites report can also be used to identify sources of inbound links for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) purposes. Websites that link to your website will increase the rankings of your pages in search engines. The Referring Sites report can be used to determine websites that are willing to link to your website opening the opportunity to acquire further inbound links for increased search engine rankings.

Considerations

The Referring Sites report can automatically provide information on the performance of online banner advertising on their websites, however the correct method of tracking online advertising is through the Campaign report. The campaign report will involve tagging advertising banners with custom code to allow differentiation between organic traffic and paid traffic from the advertising website. This is important for calculating ROI and deciding if the organic traffic that arrives from these advertising websites is sufficient.

Benefits for Different Sectors

Multi-National Corporations

• See what referral advertisements are providing favourable ROI

Domestic Corporations

• Discover possible cross-promotional allies

Medium

• Unveil new demographics based types of sites you’re receiving references from

Membership Based Organisations

• See where new members are being referred from

Public Sector

• Discover who is interested in your policies and is pointing to them via references