A person can visit your website many times before they become a referral. With the Referral.js SDK installed on your site, the Referral Visits Dashboard will provide insight into the amount of website traffic that your referral program is generating for your brand.
How to Use the Dashboard
Navigate to the Referral Visits Dashboard by going to Analytics > Referral Visits
Use the filters at the top of the page to sort the data by:
Program
Time Frame
Visitor type (converted or unconverted referrals)
Source/Medium (the domain referrals were on before visiting your site)
Campaign (pulled from the UTM_campaign code- if using)
Click on any site visitor's traffic history to see their personal lifecycle in order to get a better understanding of their brand experience prior to becoming a referral.
FAQs
How do I start tracking referral visits?
Referral visits will appear on your dashboard if you’re sending referrals to your website or if you’re using our hosted landing page builder. If you’re sending referrals to your website, you must have the Referral.js SDK installed on every page of your site to get accurate tracking data.
What type of cookie do you use for visit tracking?
We use first party cookies, not third party cookies. This means tracking works on all modern browsers and are associated with the root domain of your website.
What is a referral visit?
Referral visits are made up of page views and conversion events, and they end when there are no new events within 30 minutes of the last event.
What does medium mean?
This is like a marketing channel and is either explicitly defined or interpreted based on the referring URL. For example, if the referring URL is facebook.com, the medium will be set to “social”. If a referral clicks a link to your site and that link had a medium value set to “affiliate” then the medium will show as source.
What is a visitor?
This is a unique referral that is either converted or unconverted. A referral will show as converted when we receive a conversion event for them. Conversion events happen when a referral fills out a form with our conversion tracking setup for it.
How do you determine a source of a visit?
If a visitor to your site has our tracking cookie on their browser, we store the referring URL and then interpret that URL to define the source. If no referring URL is present, we set to the source to “direct”.
Will a referral visit from an unconverted referral change to converted traffic after the referral converts?
Each referral visit is a snapshot of a point in time and is never updated. If you filter by unconverted traffic, some of those referral visits will actually be from converted referrals.
This way you can accurately measure unconverted traffic over time and make comparisons to previous periods.
How do I use UTMs like campaign with my referral visit traffic?
An example is a marketing email campaign. If you have a list of prospects and any of them have clicked a member’s share link, then they are also referral. If you email them and the CTA link in the email has a UTM for campaign, that campaign UTM will then be stored with the referral visit.
Another example is a multi-step sales process where your referrals initial conversion is for a sales call. You can then retarget them with a email campaign using a UTM for campaign in the CTA. After sending the email campaign, you can measure how many referrals clicked the link.
What’s included in the direct source type?
This includes any referral visit where there is no referring URL. This is most common if a referral visits your site from an email link, SMS link, or by directly entering a URL in the browser.