What Is This Metric?
Referral traffic and revenue by source is tracking which websites have referred visitors to your website and the resulting revenue from these referrals.
Why Should I Care?
Knowing what other websites send you visitors and which traffic results in the most revenue tells you the types of websites your prospective customers visit. This helps you identify other websites to target for advertisements/links/partnerships in the future.
What Can I Do To Positively Effect This Metric?
To improve this metric, there are two main things you can do.
First, always make sure your landing pages are optimized. Make sure you have clear headlines and clear calls to action for visitors to follow.
Second, make sure there is consistency between the web pages visitors were on before clicking and your site’s landing page.
For instance, if the page visitors were on talks about apples you don’t want your landing page to talk about oranges (maybe not the greatest example, but I’m sure you understand what I mean).
One way to ensure even better consistency is if you create separate landing pages for each referring source, or employ web coding that customizes your pages based on referring source. For example, you can add code to the top of your page that says “Welcome Visitors from Google (or whatever site they came from).”
This will help visitors feel like they are in the right place, and will thus be more likely to take the actions you want.