Question
I have been running some Google Analytics, and have been noticing that the traffic source with the highest conversion rate (by far) has consistently been: mywebsite.com / referral. Could you give me a better idea of what this is, as there really is no descriptor as to where the traffic is coming from? I have attached the top 10 referral source below and highlighted what I am referring to. Thanks!
Answer
What you highlighted above is actually the exact same traffic as line item #2 or (direct) / (none), both of these track traffic coming to your website. The difference between #2 and #9 is "how" these pages are referenced on your website. This is a bit hard to explain but let me try. Some pages in your website reference the homepage using just a slash (/) which means take me to the homepage or take me to a file off of the homepage. However, other links in your site include the full path of your website address (URL). When the full URL is used you'll see it show up as line item #9. When the shorter slash (/) is used, which references pages off of your main directory, you will see the traffic show up in line item #2. This is a very hard concept to teach stores and they will invariably enter the entire URL when referencing pages or sub-pages in their website or blog. There's really no harm in doing this other than it make what you see in Google Analtyics a little weird. Basically, when you see these two lines in Google Analytics you just need to combine them together because all this traffic is coming from the same place - your website!
Date Created: 12/19/13