It’s time for another installment of our series on web statistics and what they can mean to a photographer. We talked about about web statistics goals, looked at web statistics software, and asked what hits, bounce rates, and unique visitors mean. Today we’re going to look at referrers, exit pages, and outbound links.
Referrers
Referrers (sometimes misspelled referers, to match a misspelling in the actual web specification) are the web pages that are driving traffic to your website. When a visitor arrives on your site because they clicked a link on another site, the URL of that other site is recorded by your stats software as the referrer. If someone does a Google search and clicks on your site in the results, you’ll see google.com in your referrers list. If they clicked a link on your Flickr profile to get to your site, you’ll see flickr.com as the referrer.
Referrers are important for a couple of reasons. First, when you see a referrer you don’t recognize, it probably means that someone linked to your site, and it’s worth checking out the page. The other use for referrers is to know (over a time period) where most of your traffic is coming from. If you’re spending a lot of time on a particular forum in order to drive traffic to your site but find that it has only sent you three hits in a month, you might rethink that strategy.
Exit Pages
Exit pages are the opposite of entrance (landing) pages. Exit pages indicate where a visitor was on your site immediately before they left. It can be interesting to know where people are leaving your site from. Sometimes you might want to look at the top exit pages and figure out why they’re driving people away.
Outbound Links
If your analytics program can track specific outbound links, not only will you know which page they were on, but you’ll be able to know precisely which link they’re clicking.
Wrapping it Up
With the various web statistics blog posts thus far, we’ve talked about quite a few metrics and what they mean. Next week, we’ll talk about one more specific statistic (search terms) and then start bringing it all together to increase traffic, leads, and readership.
Photo by AMagill, used under Creative Commons licensing
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