Where did she come from? The Importance of Referral Site Metrics

Across your marketing conference room wall are posted the top 6 customer personas who generate over 74% of company’s revenues.  Your third best customer is Olivia Ramirez.

Olivia Ramirez, aged 43, she’s a single mom who works two jobs to support her 3 elementary aged kids.  She’s concerned with how to provide her family a balanced meal for dinner each night with only 30 minutes to prepare the meal.  She has little time to plan her grocery store trips. When she shops at the grocery store she has hard time putting together ingredients quickly and within her budget.   

Your team is tasked with creating content to increase revenues from this customer.  Before you invest in the content creation work, start by understanding your traffic sources.  One place to begin understanding if your website is optimized for this customer is referring traffic.  Referring sites represents other websites that link to you, including blogs, industry associates, forums, competitors, and other places that might want to build a relationship with your business.  As part of your visitor acquisition strategy, “analyzing and optimizing your referral traffic is how you'll squeeze the most out of your marketing strategy and ad dollars, build a dedicated fan base and find partners that will help develop your audience” (Wallace, 2013).

            Let’s not forget that the key word here is “referral” and should be associated with word of mouth marketing.  According to the 2013 Nielson Trust in Advertising survey, “word-of-mouth recommendations from friends and family, often referred to as earned advertising, are still the most influential, as 84 percent of global respondents across 58 countries to the Nielsen online survey said this source was the most trustworthy” (Nielson, 2013).  Who are your brand’s friends and family, the ones sending you the most traffic?       

            In terms of driving traffic to your site, your referral strategy is synonymous with your link building strategy.  Neil Patel provides 12 useful tactics for increasing referral links to your site.  “Most people seeking to build links never actually develop a link-building strategy” (Patel, 2015).  Due to the nature of Google’s algorithm, a solid referral strategy needs to be focused on researching and cultivating relationships with the right sites. “The truth is that five quality links from authority sites will weigh more heavily in your favor than ten mediocre links from generic sites” (Patel, 2015). Here are three of his tactics:

• Research Domain Authority and Page Authority
• Track people mentioning your brand and site
• Build relationships with media editors        

Each of these three steps should be made with the buyer persona in mind. As you established relationships with various influencers, blog, and media editors from high quality referral sites, here are several tips to grow the traffic from those sites:

• Work closely to gain additional mentions in upcoming posts
• Offer for them to do a guest blog post on your site
• Develop a referral program to share profit with them (Lazazzera, n.d.)

These are just several ways to generate referral traffic to your website that should be part of a broader acquisition strategy.

An important metric to include in your referral traffic evaluation is a referral to conversion ratio.  By utilizing your analytics tool to build segments by referral traffic source and setting up a related conversion goal with a monetary value, you will be able to measure the financial impact of your efforts.  "Segmenting your data doesn’t mean focusing on the glob but rather focusing on the specific. That focus helps make ideas actionable” (Kaushik, 2010). If your site’s goal is to sell shoes, you need to know which referring sites drive the most conversion revenues. This will allow you to amplify those efforts that result in the biggest impact. 

Now as your team moves forward in creating meaningful content focused on Olivia Ramirez, use the referral site metrics to measure the impact of your link building and content campaigns. 

   

References:

Lazazzera, R. (n.d.) Referral Marketing 101: 7 Tactics to Launch Your Own Referral Campaign. Retrieved from https://www.shopify.com/blog/15679636-referral-marketing-101-7-tactics-to-launch-your-own-referral-campaign

Nielson. (2013, September 17). Under the influence: Consumer trust in advertising.  Retrieved from http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/news/2013/under-the-influence-consumer-trust-in-advertising.html

Patel, N. (2015, May 19). No Link Building Strategy Is Complete Without These 12 Tactics. Retrieved from http://neilpatel.com/2015/05/19/no-link-building-strategy-is-complete-without-these-12-tactics/

Wallace, T. (2013, Nov 27). 4 ways to optimize your referral traffic. Retrieved from http://mashable.com/2013/11/27/referrals-metrics/#DCwvm1rrWaq3