Knowing where your website visitors are coming from is useful, as understanding how people find you can help you make more informed decisions about where to focus your time and resources.
One often overlooked, but very important type of traffic source is referral traffic.
What is referral traffic?
Referral traffic refers to visitors brought to your website by clicking on a link on another site.
For example, a news article or blog post may mention your product or services and include a link to your website within the content.
When a user clicks that link and arrives on your website, Google Analytics 4 (GA4) records this as referral traffic.
This information helps you see which websites are directing visitors to your website. This can be particularly useful if you have partnerships with other sites, as you can easily see which links are driving the most engagement.
How do you see the source of referral traffic in GA4?
To find out where your referral traffic is coming from, log in to your GA4 account and select Reports – Acquisition – Traffic Acquisition in the column on the left hand side of the screen.
When the Traffic Acquisition report loads, it will show a dropdown menu labelled ‘Session Default Channel Group’ by default. Click the dropdown menu and change it to ‘Session Source/Medium’.
The table below will update to show you the website (source) and type of traffic (medium) of all traffic brought to the site throughout the date range selected.
For example, if the table contained “engageweb.co.uk / referral”, this would mean that a visitor came to your site by clicking a link on engageweb.co.uk. GA4 attributes this as referral traffic, rather than traffic coming directly or via the search engine results page.
By analysing this report, you can quickly identify which website are sending traffic to your site. This can also give you a better understanding of how people are finding your website, so you can prioritise your marketing efforts where they will have the biggest impact.
Need help identifying the sources of traffic brought to your site? Reach out to the team at Engage Web today.
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