23.05.2018
Semalt: How Referral Tra c Affects Your Data
What is referral traf c? Why is it important? Well, Jack Miller, the Senior Customer Success Manager of Semalt, explains that referral traf c is the segment of traf c that lands on your site via another source. The source could be a link from another domain. Google Analytics immediately knows where the web traf c was before landing on your site. As such it (Google Analytics) will display the domain names of these websites as referral traf c source in its reports.
How is your data affected when you exclude referral tra c? It's by default that referrers automatically trigger new sessions. However, when you opt to exclude any referral source, then the web traf c from the excluded domains does not trigger new sessions. As is obvious, if you want referral traf c to trigger new sessions then you should not include the domains in this exclusion list. From the above scenario, you can see that since referrals trigger new sessions, excluding the referrals then implies that it affects how your sessions are calculated. This interaction can be counted as a singular or multiple sessions depending on how you handle referrals. For instance, a user on mysite.com visits your website; yoursite.com then goes back to mysite.com. If you have not excluded your website (yoursite.com), then both sessions are counted. https://rankexperience.com/articles/article1317.html
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