Google Analytics - Incoming Links | Net Chatting Society of Anyone Choosing to Care

Google Analytics - Incoming Links

Posted on July 31st, 2008 by

This comes in very handy when looking to help “Promote Your Promotions”. If a site is sending you traffic, you want to know about it and identify any ways you could help increase that traffic… even if it just means digging the story or submitting it to stumbleupon.

Step 1: In the left hand navigation, click on “Traffic Sources” and “Referring Sites”

google analytics incoming links

Step 1: Now you will get a list of sites that Analytics has tracked sending traffic to your site. This informations is extremely valuable, no only does it show you the sites you have submitted links to that are sending you traffic but it also shows you all the other sites that you did not expect to get traffic from

Step 2: Click on the drop down box at the bottom of your screen that says “Show Rows” and select 500. This will now display all your sources on one screen.

google analytics

Step 3: Do NOT click on the little icon beside the listed site, this will take you to the root domain of the site and not to the actual page that sent the traffic. Instead click the actual blue underlined link.

Step 4: You will now have a list of all the pages on that site that have referred traffic to your site, you will want to click on them and you will come to a new page that has the link “Visit the referring link”, you will want to click on this.

Purpose: With this information you will want to look for three different things.

The first is the sites that you have promoted, you will want to see which of these sites have sent you traffic and which ones have not. You can then tweak your promotions to exclude the sites that are not sending traffic and you can test new sites.
The second thing is for sites that sending traffic and you were unaware of. You want to look at these sites and see how you can improve the traffic they are sending. Perhaps it is a blog that posted a comment about your site. Look and see and then make a plan of how to help them send more traffic to your site.
The third thing is to look for potential JV partners. If someone has published your content or linked to you, perhaps they will let you submit more content to their site. The next time you do a promotion, you can then send them an article to publish on their site as well.

Hope you liked this post :), if so let me hear about it… if not keep it to yourself and then make up a story of how you liked it and post that comment instead!

Part 1: Google Analytics - Installing
Part 2: Google Analytics - Keywords
Part 3: Google Analytics - Incoming Links
Part 4: Google Analytics - Outgoing Traffic
Part 5: Google Analytics - Content
Part 6: Google Analytics - Tracking with JavaScript Events
Part 7: Google Analytics - Creating Goals