Have you ever logged into your Google Analytics account and been surprised to see traffic coming from a referral source you weren’t expecting?  It truly is a great feeling.  Naturally you get excited wondering what type of link you have acquired and where the link resides.  Clicking to your referral sources in Google Analytics you see something a long the lines of:

We’ll focus on the top traffic generating source here which has sent 20 visits.  Clicking on the source you go one level deeper revealing this information:

What the heck? Going directly to this URL brings you to a 404 error page!  So how in the world can traffic be generated from this site and why doesn’t Google Analytics share where exactly the traffic is coming from?  I can’t tell you exactly why Google doesn’t show the right URL but I would guess it has something to do with parameter queries involving the ‘?’.  For this instance, the traffic is coming from someone that posted a link in a message board.  Each post on http://www.castefootball.us/ has a URL that  is unique only after the /forums/showthread.php?

How To Find The True Source Google Doesn’t Offer You.

I use two techniques to find the source which is linking back to one of my sites or a clients website.  The first one simply involves going to the root of the referring domain and doing a search for the name of your sites domain. Click on the image for the full size (its easier to read).

You will see that in this instance a simple use of the forums ‘search’ function including my sites domain name was able to pull up the thread linking to my website.  When I clicked into the thread and read through a couple pages I was able to find the exact post that linked to my site and was generating traffic.

Alternative Way of Finding Linking Forum Source

Occasionally the search function of the site doesn’t display the thread being linked to.  In this instance we have to think outside of the box and rely on our friend Google and hope they have indexed the page.  By going to Google we use the ‘site:’ operator and include the site being linked to domain.  In this example we’re looking for the forum thread that is linking back to the vikings blog on thehuddle.com.

Using the search phrase within Google: mnvikingsblog site:http://forums.thehuddle.com/ I was able to achieve this search result.

Once I clicked on the search result I was brought to the thread within the forum that contained a link back to my site. Now remember that for some reason using the ‘Search’ function within these forums didn’t bring back this result.

Technique Limitations

Neither one of these techniques is full proof.  I showed you an instance where the forum software failed to produce results even though content did contain my searched text.  In using the second technique to find my linking source I was lucky because the source was indexed by Google.  If it had not I would have been stuck on a wild goose chase.

You will also notice that in both examples the links were using URL links.  Had the links been using anchor text such as ‘click here’ or anything that didn’t contain the URL words I probably wouldn’t have been able to find the source.  Regardless, I doubt I am the only one who had issues tracking down where EXACTLY my traffic was coming from so I wanted to share with you guys these two quick tip that have helped me out tremendously.

Please feel free to add comments or additional strategies used in scenarios like this where Google Analytics doesn’t by default show you where your traffic is coming from.

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