Referral Traffic

Referral traffic is visits where the user reached your site by clicking a link on another site — not a search engine and not a social network.

Referral traffic is the foundation of the Referral channel and is built from the referrer header: the browser says which domain the user came from, and if that domain is neither a search engine nor a social network, the entry counts as Referral. Its value is showing the quality of link-building and partnerships — which sites actually send you users, not merely which linked to you. But two points make it subtle: first, the line between Referral and Social is not a matter of taste but the result of channel-grouping rules, so one domain can land in two channels across two tools; second, referral traffic is as exposed to referral-spam and bot noise as it is rich in real signal, so it should be read bot-free to keep genuine sources apart from fake ones.