Building relationships through Google Analytics

Today we're bringing you a really simple guide on reaching out to those who are referring valuable people to your website. What we're going to do is find out what other websites send visitors to your website, we're then going to look at which of these are the most valuable and finally how to go about building stronger relationships with them. The first thing you'll need to do is log into Google Analytics, click through to Traffic Sources, then Sources and finally Referrals. This will present you with a list of all the websites on the Internet that are sending people to your website. We now need to identify three columns: Source, Visits and Bounce Rate. Source refers to the website that is sending people to your website. Visits refers to the number of people that Source is sending. Bounce Rate refers to the percentage of people arriving at your site and clicking away quickly (in other words, aren't interested in what they saw). What we want to identify here is websites (Sources) that are sending a decent number of visitors to your website and are not seeing a bounce rate over about 30-40% (the lower the better in general). The Sources that fall into this criteria are website that are sending people to your website that are interested in your website. In other words, these Sources are valuable to you. In the example below, I've highlighted the 3 top Sources that are referring positive candidates: Once you've found the top referring sources, the next step is to find a way to reach out to these websites (well, the authors) to thank them for doing so. Remember, the world wide web works on the premise that websites link to each other, so you want to maintain these links and one such way is to thank the referring sources. Here are some ways you could thank them:

• Visit the website and see if there is a Twitter account you could reach out to.
• Visit the website and use a contact form or email address to send a thank you.
• Place a link on your website to their website.

Here is an example of someone doing something similar:

Winner, Winner, Chicken Dinner! @IMJacobKing wins the lowest Bounce rate referral traffic to my site this month! Just 20% 🙂 — God of SEO - Charles (@Charles_SEO) October 1, 2013

  The idea here is to thank them, but to also create a stronger relationship with them - if they're sending people to your website who are turning into customers for you, just like in the offline world, you want to thank them. After all, everyone knows that word of mouth (identically a link) is one of the most powerful referral systems.