Do you want some insightful data about where your referral traffic comes from?
In your Google Analytics reports, you can find out who recommends your site and which referral sources are the most valuable for your business.
In this article, we’ll show you how to find top referral traffic sources in Google Analytics. Let’s start…
What is Referral Traffic in Google Analytics?
Google Analytics recognizes referral traffic as visitors that land on your webpage after clicking on a link from another source (other than search engines).
For instance, let’s see you have an article about how to make chocolate chip cookies. Another food blog links your article as a source on their website. Google Analytics will record visitors that arrive on your website from that link as referral traffic.
So, why is referral traffic important?
For starters, you find that your site is highly dependent upon a single source of traffic. Since putting all of your eggs in one basket could be too risky, you may focus on diversifying traffic sources.
And by analyzing your referral traffic, you can boost your business. It gives you insights into how you can grow your website traffic. That way, you can identify which strategy works best and which doesn’t.
Now, are you ready to learn how to find referral traffic sources?
How to View Top Referrals in WordPress
The best way to use Google Analytics in WordPress is with MonsterInsights. It’s the best Google Analytics plugin for WordPress.
With MonsterInsights, you can install Google Analytics on your WordPress site without having to touch any code. And, you can view all your important Analytics data right inside your WordPress dashboard.
The best part is that it makes it effortless to set up advanced trackings in Google Analytics including eCommerce, forms, downloads, etc. and lets you view the reports inside your dashboard.
First, you’ll need to install Google Analytics on your website to allow it to track your website traffic. If you haven’t done so yet, here’s our step-by-step guide on how to install Google Analytics in WordPress.
Once you’ve properly set up Google Analytics on your site, you can find your analytics reports by going to Insights » Reports » Overview report.
Now scroll down and you’ll see your site’s top referrals.
In this report, you’ll see the top 10 websites that are sending you the most traffic. This data is extremely valuable.
You can use it for promotional activities and target these referral sources to attract visitors. It also presents an opportunity for guest posts and getting backlinks for your site.
That said, don’t confuse the report with the channels report, as it will only show websites that have a link to your website.
If you want to know all of your referral sites, you can click the View All Referral Sources button at the end of the report.
It’ll take you to the Referral Sources page in your Google Analytics account, which we’ll discuss in detail in the following section.
How to View Top Referral Sources in Google Analytics
If you’ve installed Google Analytics in WordPress without a plugin, you’ll need to log into your Google Analytics account to view the sites that are linking to your site. Now, let’s get started.
Sign in to your Google Analytics account and select the website for which you’d like to see traffic referrals.
To view the traffic referrals, navigate to Acquisition » All Traffic » Referrals. You’ll now see a table that shows referral traffic sources to your site.
If you want to see the referral sources for a different time period, feel free to change the date range from the top right-hand corner.
That’s it!
We hope you liked our article on how to find top referral traffic sources in Google Analytics. If you want, you can also check out our article on how to track user engagement in WordPress using Google Analytics.
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