Reading your referrers, and what to do about them
· 3 min read
The referrer is the site a visitor was on when they clicked through to yours. It is the closest thing analytics offers to an answer to "why did people show up?" Most people glance at it, recognise Google at the top, and move on. That is leaving the most useful data on the table.
What the list actually contains
Coldreader stores the referrer's hostname only, with the leading "www." removed and referrals from your own site dropped. So you see news.ycombinator.com, not a full URL, and you never see your own domain cluttering the list.
A large share of visits have no referrer at all. That is not a bug. It happens when someone types your address, opens a bookmark, clicks a link in a native app such as an email client or Slack, or comes from a site that sends a blank referrer for privacy reasons. Treat "no referrer" as "direct or unknown", and do not try to read too much into its size.
The four kinds of referrer
Nearly every row falls into one of four buckets, and each calls for a different response.
Search engines. Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Ecosia. These represent people looking for something you have. You do not see the search terms, and neither does anyone else anymore. What you can do is cross-reference with your top pages: if search traffic is up and one article dominates the page list, that article is ranking. Write its sequel.
Social and communities. Hacker News, Reddit, Lobsters, Mastodon instances, LinkedIn, X. These are spikes, not baselines. A spike tells you which framing resonated with which crowd. The right action is usually to go and read the thread. The comments will tell you what confused people, what they liked, and what they wish you had built. That is free user research.
Other websites. Blogs, newsletters, documentation sites, "awesome" lists. These are the rows to take most seriously. Someone chose to link to you. Visit the page, understand why, and if the link is prominent, consider reaching out to say thanks. A recurring referrer from a small site is worth more than a one-day spike from a large one, because it keeps sending people who already trust the recommendation.
Your own tools. Your status page, your docs subdomain, your GitHub repository. These are internal navigation dressed as referrals. Mentally subtract them, or if they are on a separate domain you control, treat them as one site.
Compare, do not admire
A referrer list on its own is a leaderboard. It becomes useful when compared with itself over time. Open the same list for the previous period and look for three patterns.
- A new name near the top. Someone linked to you. Find out who and why.
- A regular that dropped off. A link was removed, a newsletter stopped, or a ranking fell. Worth a look while it is recent.
- Steady growth in one row. That is a channel working. Do more of what earned it.
Referrers plus pages
The single most useful move is to combine two lists. Look at top referrers, then look at top pages, and ask which page each referrer was probably sending people to. On a small site this is obvious. If a documentation site is your second referrer and your integration guide is your second page, you have found a partnership that is already working. Make the guide better.
What referrers cannot tell you
Referrers do not carry intent. A thousand visits from a link aggregator can produce zero customers, and ten visits from a niche forum can produce three. If conversions matter, watch the pages that come after the landing page rather than the referrer count.
Referrers also cannot tell you about dark traffic: links shared in chats, emails, and apps that strip the header. If your direct traffic doubles the day after you send a newsletter, that was the newsletter. Use timing to attribute what the header cannot.
A five-minute weekly routine
- Open the referrer list for the last seven days.
- Note anything new in the top ten and visit it.
- Compare with the previous seven days and note anything that vanished.
- Check which page the top two referrers are likely feeding.
- Write one sentence about what you will do differently this week.
That is it. Most weeks the sentence will be "nothing". The weeks it is not are the weeks that matter, and you will not catch them by looking at a visitor count alone.