Foundational metrics can give companies some good initial data points to better understand the website traffic and the website’s performance. Visit characterization is another category of web analytics metrics; this enables companies to dig a little deeper into a website’s performance, traffic, and visitors. Visit characterization includes metrics such as entry and exit page, visit duration referrer, and click-through.
Visit characterization metrics offer companies another level of information; of the various metrics, the referrer metric offer some interesting data. The metric “referrer” tells a company the previous webpage a visitor was on. Referrer can be drilled down into many sub-segments, such as internal referrer and external referrer. The internal referrer indicates referral webpages only within a company’s website. The external referrer is the page a visitor was on prior to visiting a company’s website. There can be instances where the web analytics registers a visitor as “no referrer” or “direct navigation.” This typically means the visitor manually typed in the URL (Burby & Brown, 2007).
The external referrer provides some noteworthy information. It tells a company where visitors were before coming to its site and gives the company an idea of what drove the visitors to its site. This can be valuable information when assessing return on investment (ROI) and measuring the results of a company’s various online marketing activities, maybe some offline ones too (Gunelius, n.d.).
Some specific online marketing (and PR) activities the external referrer can track include search engines, news articles, and banner ads.
Utilizing the external referrer, a company can drill down into how its search engine marketing activities are working. First, the external referrer tells a company which search engine drives the most traffic to the company’s website—Bing, Google, Yahoo, etc.—as well as what search terms, words, and phrase visitors used to reach the company’s website. From this, a company can determine what’s working, what’s not working, and what it can adjust. The company can refocus activities such as search engine optimization (SEO) strategy, its paid search, and so on (Deep Software, n.d.).
The external referrer can also provide a company with a tool to partially measure the impact of its PR activities. The external referrer will tell a company what news and media websites are driving traffic, if the company is appearing in Google news searches, and if the company’s news is being shared on social media channels. – then driving traffic to its website (Sullivan, 2010). The external referrer doesn’t paint the full picture of the results (success or failure) of PR activities, but it provides useful information. The company will have a better idea of what online news and media outlets to target.
Additionally, a company can track the performance of its banner ads. It will know what types of banners are working and on which websites the banner ads drive the most traffic. This will clearly provide a company with ROI on its banner ad activities. Advertising legend John Wanamaker famously said, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half” (Sullivan, 2010). At least with banner ads, a company will have some info.
A further reason the external referrer is a powerful metric is that with it, a company knows the last business a visitor came from. This is prized marketing data. Now, when that visitor reaches a company’s website, the company can tailor messaging towards that visitor (Sullivan, 2010).
References
Burby, J. & Brown, A. (Aug. 16, 2007). Web Analytics Definitions. Web Analytics Association. Retrieved from http://www.digitalanalyticsassociation.org/Files/PDF_standards/WebAnalyticsDefinitionsVol1.pdf
Deep Software. (n.d.). Web Site Visitor Behavior Metrics. Retrieved from http://www.deep-software.com/web-site-visitor-behavior-metrics.asp
Gunelius, S. (n.d.). 10 Blog Metrics Bloggers Should Track Through Web Analytics Tools. About.com. Retrieved from http://weblogs.about.com/od/addonsandplugins/tp/10-Blog-Metrics-Bloggers-Should-Track-Through-Web-Analytics-Tools.htm
Sullivan, D. (May 25, 2010). The Death Of Web Analytics? An Ode To The Threatened Referrer. Search Engine Land. Retrieve from http://searchengineland.com/the-death-of-web-analytics-an-ode-to-the-referrer-42875
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