Referrers And Sources

The Referrers & Sources report shows you which external websites, search engines, and other traffic sources are sending visitors to your site. Understanding where your traffic originates is fundamental to making good decisions about content, marketing, and distribution.

How referrer data is collected

When a visitor clicks a link to your site from another website, the browser sends a Referer header with the request. Statalog reads this header and records the referring domain. No cookies or tracking pixels on third-party sites are involved — this is standard browser behaviour that has existed for decades and requires no special configuration.

Traffic source categories

Referral traffic

Referral traffic consists of visits where a referrer domain was present and it does not match a known search engine or social network. These are typically links from other websites — a blog post that mentioned your product, a directory listing, a partner site, or press coverage. The referral domain is shown as-is (e.g. techcrunch.com, reddit.com/r/programming, news.ycombinator.com).

Referral traffic is often your highest-quality organic traffic because it arrives with context — the visitor has read something about you before clicking.

Direct traffic

Direct traffic covers visits with no referrer information. This happens when:

  • A visitor types your URL directly into their browser
  • A visitor opens a bookmark
  • A visitor clicks a link in a native desktop application (many email clients, Slack, Teams, etc. strip the referrer)
  • A visitor arrives via a redirect chain that lost the original referrer
  • The referring page was served over HTTPS and linked to an HTTP page (browsers strip the referrer in this case)

Direct traffic is often larger than expected because of the email client and messaging app stripping behaviour. If you send newsletters, a significant share of your "direct" traffic is likely from email clicks where the referrer was stripped.

Organic search

Organic search covers visits from search engines where no UTM parameters are present on the destination URL. Statalog recognises Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, Ecosia, Brave Search, Yandex, Baidu, and other common search engines automatically — no configuration needed.

Note that Google no longer passes search keywords in the referrer (this has been the case since 2011 for HTTPS searches), so Statalog shows the traffic source as google.com without keyword detail. For keyword data you need Google Search Console.

Social networks

Visits from social networks are detected by matching the referrer domain against a built-in list of known social platforms, including Twitter/X, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, TikTok, Reddit, and others. These appear in the report grouped under their platform name.

The "unknown" referrer bucket

In some cases a referrer header is present but does not match a recognised domain pattern. This ends up in an "unknown" bucket. It is rare in practice. If you see significant unknown referrer volume, check whether a traffic source is sending unusual referrer strings that may warrant a support request.

Distinguishing paid from organic traffic

Referrer data alone cannot reliably distinguish a paid search click from an organic one — both arrive from google.com. To separate the two, use UTM parameters on your ad URLs.

When a visitor arrives via a URL tagged with utm_medium=cpc (or utm_medium=paid, paid-search, etc.), Statalog classifies the session as Paid Search rather than Organic Search. The Channels report (see Traffic channels) handles this grouping automatically.

For organic traffic, no UTM tagging is needed or desirable — adding UTMs to organic search results or social profile links is unnecessary and can distort your channel data.

A typical paid search URL looks like this:

https://yoursite.com/pricing?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=brand-2024

When this visitor arrives, Statalog records:

  • Source: google
  • Medium: cpc
  • Campaign: brand-2024
  • Channel: Paid Search

What the report shows

For each referrer source, you will see:

  • Visitors — unique visitors from this source in the date range
  • Sessions — total sessions (a single visitor can generate multiple sessions)
  • Bounce Rate — the percentage of single-page sessions from this source

These three columns together tell you both the volume and the quality of each traffic source. A source that sends 500 visitors but all bounce immediately is very different from a source that sends 100 visitors with a 20% bounce rate and longer session durations.

Filtering by source

Clicking any referrer in the table applies it as a filter across the entire dashboard. This scopes all other reports — pages, locations, devices, goals — to only visitors who arrived from that source. This is how you answer questions like "Which pages do my LinkedIn visitors land on?" or "What devices do my Google visitors use?"

Click the active filter chip at the top of the dashboard to remove the filter and return to site-wide data.

FAQ

Why is my direct traffic so high? Direct traffic is often inflated by email clients, messaging apps, and desktop applications that strip the referrer header. If you send email newsletters, a large portion of those clicks will appear as direct. Using UTM parameters on your newsletter links is the best way to recover that attribution — add utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email to your newsletter URLs and they will be correctly attributed to email rather than direct.

Can I see the full referrer URL, not just the domain? Statalog records the referring domain, not the full URL path. This is intentional — full referrer URLs can contain sensitive information (search queries, user IDs in URLs, internal path structures) and storing them would create unnecessary privacy risk.

Why do some social visits appear as direct? Mobile apps for social platforms — Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn — often open links in an in-app browser that may strip or not send the referrer header. Visits from these in-app browsers frequently appear as direct traffic. This is a browser behaviour limitation that affects all analytics tools, not just Statalog.