Making all-out marketing efforts but forgetting your good friends sending traffic your way? Not the best of approaches is it?
We are talking about referral traffic, an important channel for many businesses.
Referral traffic in GA4 helps businesses realize the, uh friends, no partners, or relevant business that helps increase visits to your websites.
It is a considerably important channel and GA4 helps you analyze it at various levels to enhance your profitability.
The segment of your website traffic that comes to your site from a link or domain not associated with your Google Analytics 4 account is termed referral traffic.
People visit websites through various sources. They type the address directly into the URL or search on Google (organic), and click through ads on social media or other venues.
But none of these qualify as referral traffic because all of these sources are associated with your GA 4 property via the UTM tags.
They might have some link to referral traffic but more on that later.
So, what is referral traffic?
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As businesses develop, they build a rapport with other businesses. Among other things, it translates into getting referrals on other websites, blogs, social media posts, and more.
Sources of referral traffic can include but are not limited to;
It means that these other businesses mention the website in question on these platforms and add a link to their website.
When people click through these links to arrive at a website, GA4 logs them into the referral traffic channel.
While it may not make sense for relatively new businesses to explore their referral traffic, it is an essential measure for established websites.
The latter have sufficient business terms and market influence to warrant referrals and therefore can drive significant traffic from them.
Let us help you understand where you can find referral traffic in GA4.
Before we discuss the where, how, and what of the referral traffic in GA4, let us briefly go over the Google Analytics interface.
On the GA4 Homepage, you will find four icons in the vertical menu bar on the left.
Or opt to build a custom report from scratch with a Blank report
You find the earliest indication of the referral traffic in the acquisition report.
Depending on whether you appreciate the User Acquisition report or the Traffic Acquisition report, you can scroll down on either report to find users acquired through channels.
To see the users acquired via Referral you can;
You can also find out about the referral traffic in Explorations;
Following these steps will leave you with a Referral Report that you may return to in the future as well.
You can use the information in the report to focus your attention on the referral pages bringing the most traffic.
You may add metrics like conversions, revenue, and engaged sessions to find the most profitable referrals.
One of the things Universal Analytics users will miss in Google Analytics 4 is the Referral Path. It helps businesses understand the exact URL that drives traffic to their website.
But with updates in Google’s privacy rules, the feature does not appear in GA4.
Still, businesses want to learn which external pages drive traffic to their websites.
There could be several pages on a single partner website that users click to arrive at your website. You need a detailed breakdown to find out the ones working best for you.
Let us find out how you can find out the referral path in GA4.
Using Google search to look up your referral path may not be an ideal solution, but something you can consider.
We have discussed viewing the referrals in the First user (User acquisition) or Session (Traffic Acquisition) table in the Acquisition reports.
And refining the results with the addition of the dimension “Landing Page + Query String”.
We will go about finding the referrer URL from the Landing page + Query string;
You can find a way around to still see the referral path on your website in Explorations.
To create a referral path report;
Once set up, you will see the Referral Path Report where you can find the links driving traffic (or other metrics, if chosen) to your website.
Alternatively, you can create a Referral Path Report in Explorations by opting for a different set of dimensions and metrics.
If referrals are considerably important for a business, it can be quite the hassle, having to go to Explorations every single time to view referrals.
Create a Referral Traffic Report in GA4 instead;
Now, you can access your referral stats more conveniently. Play around with your data by adding the relevant metrics and filters.
Not all of the referral traffic showing up in your reports is useful. Some of the data flowing in does not help anyone and has to be removed.
Here are the types of referral data that you would want to remove;
Let us explore the options to tidy up your referral traffic report.
The only thing you need to do to remove self-referral is to set up Google Analytics 4 properly.
You can do so by following these steps;
Doing so will enable GA4 to stop considering your domains for future reports.
Besides the domains and subdomains of the website, you also wish to remove the third-party websites such as the ones used for online payments or partner websites.
Remove the unwanted referrals by following the steps below;
Remember Configuring your domains or removing unwanted referrals will only work on future reports. Historic data will appear without any changes in the past reports. |
You may not be seeing any referral traffic because there was not any traffic for the given date range.
Adjust the date range by clicking on the date at the right corner of the Acquisition report. Increase the date range in the drop-down calendar to find referral traffic.
Another reason why you do not see any referral traffic is that your website is too new to have gathered enough backlinks.
The backlinks that you do have are not the right ones and therefore unable to drive traffic to your website.
Go to Google Search Console and explore the backlinks to your website. If nothing shows up there, you won’t see any results in referrals.
For marketers looking for insights into their data by modifying their channel groups, referral channels may not populate correctly.
It's because the newly created rules apply in a very broad context to the referrals.
You can find a way around this by generating a full report with the modified channel group and opting for source/medium dimensions expanded to maximum rows.
Download the report and examine it closely to find any referrals.
We have discussed the referrals at length, but why is referral traffic so important?
When businesses create content that informs, educates, engages, and nourishes their audiences, they establish credibility.
Eventually earning them backlinks from other relevant businesses or partners. The right backlinks drive traffic to the website.
Analyzing the referral traffic helps businesses assess the content strategies that work.
This way businesses can optimize their content marketing strategies to get the most out of the backlinks.
Referral traffic tells you the backlinks bringing most of the traffic to the website. Go one step further and study the user journey in GA4 in Explores.
It will help you find out the backlinks that end up converting and if you have an e-commerce store, bringing revenue.
With this information by your side you can you can focus your efforts on the backlinks generating the most conversions and revenue.
Maybe even enter into a partnership with them to increase revenues.
As you scroll to the right in the acquisition report or the one generated in Explorations, you will find landing pages where most of the referral traffic is landing.
Once you find that out, you can optimize those landing pages to provide better service quality and enhance the customer experience.
Referral traffic is unique in that the users do not respond to any advertisements or actively seek you.
It can be very useful to study the differences between the numbers, engagement rate, and conversions coming from other channels and referrals.
Use the engagement score to design your future marketing strategies and resource optimization to get the most benefit.
Despite security measures like firewalls, and GA4 filters against bot spam spammers can get creative.
It can mess up your referral traffic stats as well.
But analyzing the referral traffic closely helps you point out such backlinks and makes it easy for you to add to your exclude domain list.
Referral traffic in GA4 refers to the visitors coming from links on other websites, blogs, or social media not associated with a website’s domains.
It can be accessed in a few ways. In the Acquisition Reports, you can find referrals in the channels, in the detailed acquisition report.
There analysts can find more insights by typing “referral” in the search bar of the tabular report and choosing source/medium as the dimension.
Although the report is available for both User Acquisition (event data) and Traffic Acquisition (session data), most prefer the latter.
One can also go to Explorations and play around with the data by importing “Page referrer”, “Session default channel group”, “Event Name” dimensions, and the “Event count” Variable.
Another way to create a similarly useful report is to import the “Page referrer” and “Landing Page + Query String” and the relevant metrics and values.
These methods require some effort every time at the end of the marketing analyst to move around the data. One can also create a “Referral Traffic Report” and publish it to the “Life Cycle” to be able to come back and view results every time.
You may need to remove unwanted referral traffic for your domain, and unwanted referrals like partner websites, payment websites, and spam.
It can achieved by Configuring Your Domains and Configuring Tag Settings.
Sometimes referrals are not visible because the website does not have any referral traffic, does not have referrals for the selected date range, and modifications in channel groups.
But why do you go to so much trouble for referral traffic?
Because it helps you assess the success of your marketing efforts, identify valuable domains bringing the most conversions, see what works, and identify spam backlinks.
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