Referral Traffic

Referral traffic generally describes visits to a website that analytics attributes to a link clicked on another website. A local chamber of commerce listing or a neighborhood association page might send visitors to a cleaning company's site. These visits can help show which outside websites introduce potential customers. Referral traffic is not the same as a backlink: a backlink exists as a link whether or not anyone clicks it, while referral traffic measures visits that were attributed to such a source. Tracking can be affected by browser settings, redirects, campaign tags, and analytics rules, so reports may not capture every referring visit exactly.