A referrer is the site that a visitor came from.
For example, if someone clicks a link in a Tweet that takes them to your site, then the referrer is Twitter.com. If they click on your site in a Google search results page, then the referrer is Google.com.
Referrer types
There are five referrer types included in the dashboard:
- Social
- Search
- Ad
- Referral
- Direct
Social: popular social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
Search: search engines like Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo.
Ad: advertising platforms, such as Google Ads and Google Display Network
Referral: websites that don’t fit into the social, search, or referral categories. This includes mostly blogs and news sites.
Direct: used when there is no referrer data. This occurs when a visitor types your site’s address into their browser rather than visiting from another site. It can also occur when a privacy feature in the browser strips out the referrer data.
Can I see the page they came from?
Unfortunately, no.
Browsers used to include the page the visitor was referred from, but now they only include the domain. This means that if a visitor arrives on your site from an article on Wikipedia, you can see that they came from Wikipedia but not the exact page they came from.
The exception is if you have the ability to create the referring link yourself. In this case, you can create a campaign link to track the exact page visitors come from.