Pumping Up Page Referrals

Page referrals are the biggest indicators of where your website traffic is coming from. The two main types of referrals sources are referral URLs and keywords (Kaushik, 2009). Identifying keywords that are driving traffic to your webpages can help you structure your online marketing campaigns and optimize your page content for those terms most relevant for your audience (Kaushik, 2009).

Referral URLs are also very important to identify, especially when you can couple them with conversion rates.  The cross-section of those two metrics will help you understand which referring sites are most valuable to your organization (Kaushik, 2009).  Once those referrers have been identified, it can be helpful to build relationships with the owners of those sites in an effort to continue driving the incoming traffic from those sites.

Another key element to building referral traffic is to seek out potential influencers and begin to build relationships with them to increase referral traffic.  Ideally, you want to turn these influencers into full-fledged brand advocates.  These brand advocates, especially if they are bloggers with an enthusiastic following will increase both your social referral traffic and traffic from referral URLs.

According to Forbes contributor Jayson DeMars, some strategies beyond building relationships with influencers include offering subject matter experts as guest bloggers for other sites and offering content for syndication.

A recent case study highlightingangling website called Fishidy was featured on BuzzStream’s Blog. Fishidy is an online social networking community geared toward fishing fanatics.  The website features fishing maps and reports, links to tools, and contests, and requires registration for premium content.

The case study highlights a few other strategies the brand used to build external referrals beyond what was suggested by DeMars.  Fishidy focused on creating external editorial content via a planned public relations campaign.  The brand also focused on developing external referrals via reviews and blog comments. Finally, Fishidy focused on developing relationships with government entities and tourism organizations so that links to the site would be included on government licensing pages and tourist-related fishing webpages.

After implementing the above strategies, as well as the ones mentioned by DeMars, Fishidy’s web traffic viareferrals grew by 157%.  The brand increased social referrals by 2,600% from Twitter and 252% from Facebook. Fishidy also acquired more than 60 resource links, which are links on government and tourism sites. These increases are all from relationship building strategies, which means that there is no direct cost for the improvements. The costs are indirect and come in the form of employee time that it takes to build such relationships.

Many organizations cannot afford the staff time to dedicate a huge chunk of time for such complex campaigns, so as time allows, it’s conceivable that you could choose any one of these ideas and develop an implementable strategy, which would deliver real results.  Then, moving forward, you could choose to tweak the existing strategy to further increase referral traffic, or you could choose to implement one of the other strategies to broaden reach.

As Kaushik said, you can ALWAYS grow your referral traffic (2009), so any moment is a good time to start.


Offline Reference

Kaushik, A. (2009). Web Analytics 2.0: The Art of Online Accountability and Science of Customer Centricity. Wiley. Kindle Edition.