Referrer Tracking

where is my traffic coming from?

Web-Stat automatically tracks visitors sent to your site by other sites or search engines (the referrers). The results are then presented in three reports:

Monthly Referrers:

This listing shows the cumulative number of visits from all the referrers that have sent traffic to your site during the selected period. Previous months data is available from the archive bar above the report

Note that you can regroup similar referrers under a common name. For instance if you receive visitors from Google.com and Google.co.uk, you may want to look only at the total and regroup all these referrals under the heading 'Google'. To achieve this, simply click on the 'group referrers' link in the menu bar above the report.

The Monthly Referrers report also includes, for each one of your referrers:

Time on Site. This measures visitors engagement with your site and goes hand-in-hand with the average visit depth metric (below). Usually the higher the average time on site, the better.
Visit Depth. The depth of a visit is the number of pages a visitor saw during his session on your site. Like time-on-site, it is a measure of visitors engagement with your site. Usually the higher the average visit depth, the better
Bounce Rate. The bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who come to your site and leave after seeing only one page. In the case of bounce rates, lower is better. A low bounce rate indicates that (1) your landing page is good at engaging the user and retaining his attention and (2) the referrer traffic is targeted to what your site offers. In other words people did not find you by mistake and clicked back: they were indeed searching for the information you make available.
Conversions. The conversions for the particular referrer, as raw numbers or as color-coded percentage of the traffic. To display the conversions menu, click on the check mark in the top menu bar.

The three metrics above are very important in measuring the quality of your referred traffic and the adequation of your site to this traffic (targeting). In general, the higher the average visit depth and time on site, and the lower the bounce rate, the better the site is at capturing the interest of visitors coming from that particular referrer. On the contrary, a poorly targeted referrer (or a poorly designed site) will generate high bounce rates, low visit depths and low time-on-site (note that this is true in general, but there are special cases where it could be argued that a high visit depth/time-on-site is not a good thing as it might indicate that visitors have difficulty finding the information they are looking for

For your convenience, the time-on-site, visit depth, bounce rate and conversion percentage columns are color-coded to identify deviation from the site's average. Pink cells indicate results worse than average while green cells indicate results better than average. The deeper the color the greater the deviation from average. Some cells are colored yellow, meaning that there is not enough data to make them statistically relevant.

Search Engine and Referrer Tracker:

This graph shows how many visitors were sent to your site each week by each one of your referrers. It is extremely helpful to detect any drop or increase in traffic from a particular referrer and to check the validity of your referencing/marketing strategy.

Note that you can set several options on that graph:

navigate the timeline using the handles just under the graph itself.
click on a given referrer in the legend to hide it. The graph's scale is then recalculated.
by clicking on successive referrers you can zoom in towards the bottom of the graph as needed

As in the monthly referrers report above, you can regroup similar referrers under a common name. For instance if you receive visitors from Google.com and Google.co.uk, you may want to look only at the total and regroup all these referrals under the heading 'Google'. To achieve this, simply click on the 'group referrers' link in the menu bar above the report.

Recent referrers:

This is a real-time detailed list of the last 100, 500 or 1000 visitors to your site. When a referrer is detected it will be displayed in the 'Referrers' column. In the case of search engines, we will also display the keywords used to find you (when available).

Important Notes :

Referrers detection will not work if you are using the simplified version of the Web-Stat code. The standard or advanced version is required.
You can gather an amazing amount of information with Web-Stat referrer tracking. Measuring the return of pay-per-click, email or banner advertisement campaigns is a popular example and can be achieved easily if you properly configure your account. Please click here for additional information on this topic.