- [Narrator] When we left the last video
we noticed that the referrals to our sites
had some pretty impressive traffic quality metrics.
We wanna dig in a little bit further.
For that, there's actually an entire report
devoted just to referrals, which we'll open here.
And then under the acquisition section called referrals.
Go ahead and close navigation, so we can
see the whole thing.
Now recall that referring sites is
simply a fancy way to describe sites
that link to yours.
In other words, sites that refer traffic to your site.
Google Analytics has the ability
to detect that incoming visit from a link
and record which page sent the link
as the referring site.
From then on, anything that's done
during this visit, goal, transaction,
will be credited or attributed back
to that referring source.
We see here a data table that lists
all the sites that referred traffic to us via a link.
YouTube, here is a dominant source.
You can see from the small 37% in parenthesis
that this single referral source
is almost 40% of all of our referrals.
But you probably know by now I'm immediately
gonna look over and look at how it does
with respect to our goals or our e-commerce conversions.
And we're seeing a bit of mixed signals.
You see that YouTube contributes
almost 40% of the total traffic volume
but only 0.28% of the revenue for
the merchandise store within this month
and the e-commerce conversion rate is only 0.06%.
So although more users came to this site from YouTube,
not too many of those converted
or actually purchased something.
So let's go ahead and sort this table by revenue.
And we see that YouTube is only really
number six on this and quite a ways down
from our top ones here.
Let's actually take a quick look
at e-commerce conversion rate as well.
It's always an interesting one.
And then remember what we wanna do is a weighted sort.
Most of the time that will highlight
the ones that are particularly interesting
in both volume, particularly since this is a rate,
we can see the ones that have enough volume to matter.
Now because this data's only from within a month
you're still gonna see a few stragglers.
We can see a few sources of the greater
number of users and a pretty solid
conversion rate, however.
But YouTube isn't even on the page for this metric.
Now it's always a good time to find hidden gems
within this referral source.
Particularly when I work with clients
who see unexpected sources pop up,
the first question they have is,
"I wonder where are they sending this
"traffic to, on my site?"
We can easily answer that with a secondary dimension.
So again, we're gonna go back to sorting by users.
Hit our major traffic sources here.
And we're gonna add a secondary dimension of landing page.
So this is gonna be where are they actually landing
when they come to my site?
So what we get here is a combination
of these two dimensions.
So here you can see a source over on the first column.
So its' coming from YouTube.
It's coming from Google.
And this is where it's landing on our site.
What is the page that they're coming to?
Sometimes you'll see repeated sources,
analytics.google.com, if they are linking
to two different places.
There's a link to our home page analytics.google.com.
And there is also, apparently, a link here as well.
And one of the things you can do
if you want to investigate this a little closer
is actually click on this link.
So if we wanna see where on sites.google.com
is it sending?
And then it will give us the referral path.
The referral path is the page on the site
that's sending the traffic.
So it's coming from this page to our site.
This isn't the page on our site.
Now if we wanna put it all together
and say, "Okay, it's coming from this page
"to the next page."
You probably guessed it, we'll go up here
and add a landing page as our secondary source
and we can see the referral path
from the site that's sending the traffic.
And then the landing page to where it's coming from.
So we know it's coming from this page, to this page.
In either case, if you wanna go check
out one of these pages, you can click
this little box here and it will pop open
a browser with a link to that page.
For example if I click this one,
pops open the home page of our merchandise store.
So as you can see here, there's a ton of info
we can uncover about who is linking to us,
where they're linking from, where they're linking to.
I encourage you to spend some time digging
in these with your own reports.
With this referral report you can determine
not only who's sending that traffic
but just as importantly, which sources
send quality traffic that converts on your goals.
Always something to keep in mind.