You can see where your website’s visitors came from, either by looking in your weekly summary email, or via your stats login.
The report lists the number of visitors who have clicked through from an external website, then arrived at your website. So it will display websites such as search engines, social media sites, news and blog sites, trade directories, forums, etc. These are called “referring websites”, because they pass visitors to your website.
It can be useful to look at these referring websites, so you can check how (and why) they are mentioning you.
If your website has been newly launched, it’s perfectly normal to find this list doesn’t contain any entries yet, because other websites have not created any links to your site yet.
Tip – if you see links starting with t.co, this means they are links from Twitter.
What does “No referring link” mean?
This means the stats system did not record these visitors arriving from an external website.
Instead, this is because the visitors:
- Typed your web address directly into their browser address bar.
- Clicked on a link within an email message, which opened their web browser.
- Clicked a bookmarked link that they had already saved in their browser.
So these visitors arrived at your website directly, without being referred by any other website.
It is normal to have a high proportion of these kind of visitors.