When analyzing where your site’s traffic comes from, it’s tempting to focus on the usual suspects: you know, the visits from Paid Search, SEO, e-mail campaigns and even direct access and bookmarked sources. Don’t make that mistake.

Instead, be sure to look at Other Referrals – other sites that bring you traffic – as well. A little more analysis can uncover a wealth of additional insights and opportunities, and it all starts with knowing what reports to pull (and what to do with them!):

• Traffic Source Report: The first report to pull is a basic Visits report, broken out by traffic source. This’ll give you an idea of what percentage of your site’s visits can be attributed to other referrals. Starting off with this report also allows you to better see the big picture and gain insight into how Other Referrals stack up compared to the rest of your site’s traffic sources.
  
  
• Referring Domains Report: Next, pull a Referring Domains report. This should be a standard report in your web analytics tool, and it shows the number of visits and the percentage of visits coming from each domain. But don’t stop there – after all, there aren’t that many insights you can gain from simply looking at visits, which brings us to Step 3…
  
  
• Referring Domains Report (customized): The next step is to customize your Referring Domains report:
  
  
1. Start by getting rid of percentage of visits. You can keep the visits metric, but be sure to combine your visits data with two or three other conversion metrics that are valuable to you. Looking at multiple metrics will help you better understand how a specific referrer impacts your site. For instance, a specific referrer might have brought in a high volume of traffic, but further analysis may reveal that those leads weren’t highly qualified. ALWAYS quantify and qualify.
2. Before you export your report, consider applying a filter first. You’ll probably notice that a lot of your top referring domains are from the search engines, so use a traffic source filter to weed out as many of these results as you can to get a better look at other referring domains.
3. Once you’ve applied the filter and exported your report, manually take out the few search engines results that are left. Then, calculate your conversion rates (divide conversion metrics by visits) and sort the report by your most valuable conversion rate metric. You’ll also need to manually clean up the data by applying a threshold for visits. Doing so will allow you to 1) get rid of the referrals that brought in very little traffic and 2) put conversion rates into perspective (100% conversion rate for 2 visits, for instance).

With these steps, you should be able to create a valuable Referring Domains report. And once you have one, you can then take a close look at each of your top referring sites to see what untapped opportunities exist.

A little quality assurance can’t hurt either. For example, make sure that links to your site are directing visitors to the proper page (e.g. if copy pertains to a particular section of your site, but the referring link takes visitors to your homepage, then you may want to consider contacting that referring site to make sure the destination URL is correct). Similarly, take a look at how your calls-to-actions and content are presented. If needed, you may want to consider adding images or changing up how calls-to-actions are displayed to attract even more visitors.

Pulling reports for a valuable referring domain analysis is fairly simple, but the insights you gain can go a long way towards improving customer response and uncovering new opportunities. The next time you see Other Referrals as part of a Traffic Source report, don’t just glance over the figures – take a close look – and use that knowledge to take a smart next step.

Dianne Ignacio is a Web Performance Analyst at Acronym Media.