Referral Madness
Do you know where your traffic comes from? If you answered no, then you are not aware or taking advantage of some great information that is available to you at your finger tips! This info is called your referrers and you would be mad to not take advantage of what these details can offer your Web site marketing strategy.
Referrers — are where your traffic is coming from before folks land at your site –where your site visitors were when they clicked on a link to enter your site. Your hosting server tracks this info no matter what type of site you have HTML, WordPress, Joomla, PHP or ASP.
Referral stats are invaluable because…
- You can see what sites are linking to you so you can visit them, thank them and open a dialog for future collaboration.
- You can get a good idea of what information folks are most interested in. Not only because you were linked to but by how many folks followed that link to see what you have to say on the topic at hand.
- You can see what pages within your own site were the doorway or first impression to your site. Don’t fall into the trap that your “home page” is where everyone enters your site — the fact is many won’t. They’ll follow referrers from other sites to internal pages within yours.
When you know where your traffic is coming from, what topics searchers find interesting, what pages keep them on your site following links to more of your hand-crafted offerings — you then know what’s hot!
You then use that information to provide more of the same, build upon what’s there and look for ways to have those pages cajole visitors to sign up for your feed, contact you for info about your services or to segue into topics that are closely related that visitors will also be interested in. (On WordPress sites using a plugin that offers related articles at the end of each post helps you do this too.) This all adds up to more face time on your site.
On most hosting servers you’ll find your referrers in the Logs section, under names like Webalizer, AWStats or Urchin to name a few. If you don’t know where your stats are located, search your hosting provider’s Knowledge Base for “visitor stats” and they’ll point you in the right direction.
If you don’t have a host that offers this necessary and valuable information, move to a host that does. This is information that is not on a need to know basis — this is info you need to know!
At your service,
Your WordPress Consultant
No related posts.
