How are Traffic Sources defined in Analytics?
This article provides information on referrers and definitions of the different types of traffic sources displayed in Siteimprove analytics.
- Blocked Referrers
- Internal referrers
- External Referrers (Domains)
- External Referring Pages
- Social Media
- Search Engines
- External Search Terms
- Direct Traffic
- Related articles
Blocked Referrers
Whether a referrer is passed along in the browser is determined by the referrer policy on the external referring site.
Referrals that are blocked by a referral policy are included in the Direct traffic statistics in Siteimprove.
When a visitor navigates to a non-secure (HTTP) site from a link on a secure (HTTPS) site, it is registered as a direct traffic referrer. This is because the secure site will not pass referrer information to the non-secure site. Read more on Referrer-Policy best practices (Google dev site).
Internal referrers
We find internal referrers as the initial traffic source in a variety of scenarios.
It could be that the previous visit ended while browsing the website (leaving the tab open and being inactive for 30 minutes etc), and then the visitor continues browsing, thereby starting a new visit with an internal referrer. Also, depending on how the Siteimprove Analytics script was implemented, it could also be that they were referred from an internal page without the script on.
External Referrers (Domains)
External Referrers (Domains) typically refer to external referrers coming from any domain that is not your own.
Depending on the settings of your Analytics site, it could be that you track two or more domains as your own internal domains. You might have this setup done if you own more than one domain and want to do cross-domain tracking.
Example: You own the domains "thisismydomain.com" and "thisismydomain.de" and also "superdomain.com". You are linking between those domains and want to track visitor behavior between them, and you have told Siteimprove to set up all three sites as internal. The external traffic will be traffic from all domains that are not those three internal domains.
External Referring Pages
External Referring Pages are pages on external domains that have referred visitors to your website.
Social Media
Social media and apps that have referred visitors to your website. Traffic from social media is also considered traffic from external referrers.
Search Engines
Traffic coming from search engine referrers, such as Google, Bing, Baidu, Yahoo, etc. The Referrals number in the table on this page shows the number of times someone clicked a link on the search domain that led to the website.
External Search Terms
Search terms that have been used on external search engines to reach your website.
Note: In some cases, external search terms are listed as "Not provided". This occurs when searches are carried out on a secure Google webpage (HTTPS) and where the keyword is not passed along when the user clicks on a search result. We are sorry that we cannot provide this information – but it is unfortunately out of our hands.
Direct Traffic
Traffic that has not come from an identifiable external traffic source. These identifiable external traffic sources are usually links that can be clicked on other websites/domains and search engines.
Also, see the article "Behavior Tracking Terminology" for a definition of Direct traffic (first visit) and Direct traffic (returning visit).
Direct traffic occurs in the following cases:
- visitors coming to your website via links in their email-clients (Outlook, Lotus Notes, etc), including when they click on links in newsletters.
- visitors coming to your website via clicking on bookmarks in their browser.
- visitors coming to your website by typing in the URL of your page directly into their browser
- visitors coming to your website via links from PDFs.
- visitors coming to your website by clicking on ad banners may also not send a referrer URL depending on their redirect.
- visitors coming to your website by clicking on shortening URLs can be direct traffic depending on their redirects
- visitors coming to your website by clicking on a URL on a website with referral policy blocking referrer data.
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