Referral Traffic
Visits that arrive by clicking a link on another website, as opposed to arriving from a search engine or by typing the address.
Analogy Mental model
The barber next door tells a customer that the café around the corner is excellent, and the customer walks straight in.
In practice What you actually do
Filter sessions by source and medium to isolate referrals, then read them as a quality check on your off-site work: which publications, which directories, and which AI assistants actually sent people who browsed and bought, rather than people who bounced.
Where people get burned Pitfalls
Payment providers redirect through their own domains, so a completed order can end up credited to the processor instead of to you. Exclude those domains from referral reporting or every checkout will look like a marketing win for someone else.
This entry was written in English from the Chinese original, not machine-translated. Read the Chinese version →