Monitor referrals to a Web Site

When a web site has a set of links to it, you get a referral when the user follows the link. This is usually by a person clicking on a link in a browser or else by an automated scanning engine or robot.

It is important to monitor the number of referrals coming to a site to be able to adjust the site content and therefore the keywords to attract more visitors. It may be that you are getting people to come to the site for the wrong reason and are not going to stay or come back again.

When a user follows an HTML link to get from one web page to another, the web server typically store how a page (locally or remotely was referred to). Tracking how people get referred to a web site is crucial to measuring the effectiveness of a web site. Are people getting to the information quickly and easily ? Are they only looking at one page and then leaving the web site ? Which keywords and phrases are people using to reach your site ?

Some firewalls give the option to remove the referral information in order to give the user more anonymity, if a web site needs to be sure it knows where it has been referenced from it needs to include this as part of the query part of a URL.

Referral monitoring allows the sources of external web traffic to be identified. Typically Google will be the largest source of referrals as most people find web sites from a search engine, and Google is by the far the most popular one at present.

By using referrer information you can work out :

When another site has added a link to one of your pages.
When a site gets included in search engine databases.
Which Keywords are being used to find your site on search engines.
When your site is mentioned in an online forum or blog.

referral site web

Site Vigil's referral monitoring feature lets you know as soon as new sources of referrals are being received by the web site. You can set the threshold that will signal an alert to be raised. It builds up a list of keywords used to reach the site from search engines. The following screen shot shows a sample list of live referrals received on a site. The list of keywords used in the queries to reach the site are shown in the list underneath it.

referral site

Site Vigil™ is a sophisticated web site monitoring tool that lets you thoroughly check your site. Improve the effectiveness of your web site by tracking the flow of visitors. Make sure your site is operational and your web host is giving a fast, trouble-free service. Automatically check the position of your site on search engines and the validity of all the links.

It runs on an ordinary Windows® PC, using your normal Internet connection to gather data quietly in the background. Periodically it will alert you as soon as a problem is spotted.

Site Vigil is available for a free 40 day trial, give it a try by going to the download page.
To look at the program features in more detail take an online tour of the product
We have a large reference section and a set of case studies to help you with all your monitoring needs.