Google Analytics: how to find forum referrals

Posted on 20th February 2012 in Analytics. So far there are 0 comments.

You look at your sites stats and see that there is a big spike in visitors, but where have they come from?

If you are using Google Analytics (and if not, why not?) then you can drill down through Traffic Sources > Sources > Referrals to get a list of your referrals and how many Visits they have referred.

But which pages on these sites are referring visitors? It’s important to know in case the links are not exactly positive.

You click on a referrer and you’re faced with this:

 

All this tells you is that someone on a forum has linked to your site and referrals are coming in. What was the post? You cannot tell, and I find this annoying because I want to know the context of the referral.

After much searching I found a couple of hacks that used to work from within Google Analytics but no longer seem to. The answer, or at least ONE answer, is to use the Google search engine itself using some of its built in features.

All links to my site contain the phrase “nicomorgan” either as nicomorgan.photoshelter.com… or www.nicomorgan.com… so that is what I will search for but I will also add the “site:” feature to limit the results of Google’s search to the referrer in my list, in this case I will use the Chronicle of the Horse website https://www.chronofhorse.com.

The search looks like this:

nicomorgan site:chronofhorse.com

This means: search for the phrase “nicomorgan” on the site chronofhorse.com and nowhere else.

The results show the individual posts.

Now I just wish I could sort these so the most recent was at the top!

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