Referrals: Referral Traffic and Visitor Acquisition Sources: How Twitter Referral Data Can Shape a Marketing Campaign

(LoginRadius, 2014)

The success of a digital marketing campaign and vital tactic like a website requires understanding one’s audience. This means going beyond their interactions with the website and whether or not they convert, but also their origin and behavior prior to entering your website. The source of traffic to a page or website entry point is known as a referral.

Referral traffic is Google's method of reporting visits that came to your site from sources outside of its search engine; when someone clicks on a hyperlink to go to a new page on a different website, Google Analytics tracks the click as a referral visit to the second site (Bashara, 2017). The site of origin is the referrer, since it refers traffic from one site or digital tactic - such as a display ad or partner website - to the next. In addition to Referral Traffic, Google Analytics also measures Search Traffic and Direct Traffic.

Diving deep into referral traffic metrics can help marketers determine which referral sources lead the the most conversions. Fairmont Hotels leveraged Google Analytics referral reports to understand the impact of social media traffic to unique visits to their website. Fairmont Hotels tracked the quality of traffic from Twitter, which is normally categorized as Third-Party Traffic in the Google Analytics platform, but also registered as Direct Traffic if the link is copied-and-pasted into a new browser. To make sure the aggregation of the source is accurate, the company decided to use URL builder, in which a link can be given parameters like source, medium, campaign name etc., which lets the company track the source of twitter traffic irrespective of where the link is clicked on (Nagarad, 2018). Their efforts resulted in a clearer understanding of the impact of Twitter referrals on their unique visits and ultimately, conversions. An increase in conversions as a result of a specific Twitter campaign can help marketers understand what resonates with that audience to increase traffic to and conversions at the Fairmont Hotels website. The source of website visitors is important because one can segment traffic from each channel to help you see which traffic source brings you the most engaged and relevant visitors (Trice, 2016). These insights can then be applied to campaign strategies and marketing budget allocation.

Referral traffic from Twitter can be analyzed in a more granular level. The Referral Paths report in Google Analytics can break down the “who” and “how” of tweets to your website. Applying Chrome extension Campalyst Tweet Lookup Plugin converts bit.ly URLs to actual tweets in your report suite for a nominal fee (Patel, 2018). This is an opportunity for Fairmont Hotels if gaps were discovered with their tracking codes in the above example.

Figure 1: Campalyst Tweet Lookup Plugin provides actual tweets and sources of the tweets within the Referral Sources report of Google Analytics (Patel, 2018).

Reporting at this level opens more doors for marketers to understand what messages are resonating with their audiences. Understanding which tweets are driving more traffic to your website will help you understand not just what content is most successful in driving traffic, but which Twitter profiles are the strongest brand advocates. Marketers could use this data to contact influential brand advocates and build an influencer marketing campaign, whereby a select group of influencers are groomed to promote the brand in their social media accounts, for a small fee or other rewards from the company.

All brands can benefit from understanding their referral traffic, it’s sources, content, and how those messages ultimately result in conversions (or bounces). Cultivation of meaningful content that drives visitors to a website or to purchase/sign up/convert does not solely happen on the brand’s website; tactics and communications driving to the website are all part of a holistic integrated marketing campaign that can benefit from optimization as a result of web data reporting to uncover what messages are performing the highest.

References
Bashara, R. (2017, November 21). What Is Referral Traffic in Google Analytics? Retrieved October 21, 2018, from https://smallbusiness.chron.com/referral-traffic-google-analytics-53168.html
LoginRadius. (2014, December 26). How to Drive Referral Traffic with Social Sharing. Retrieved October 21, 2018, from https://blog.loginradius.com/2014/12/drive-referral-traffic-social-sharing/Nagarad, S. (2018, April 03). 10 Best Google Analytics Case Studies. Retrieved October 21, 2018, from https://www.digitalvidya.com/blog/google-analytics-case-studies/
Patel, N. (2018, July 05). What You Can Learn from Referral Paths in Google Analytics. Retrieved October 21, 2018, from https://neilpatel.com/blog/referral-paths-in-google-analytics/
Trice, S. (2016, August 8). 5 Google Analytics metrics every pharma marketer should know. Retrieved October 20, 2018, from https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/5-google-analytics-metrics-every-pharma-marketer-should-sawyer-trice/