What a Traffic Referral Is and Isn’t
Before we go too much further into the findings, it’s important to understand what we mean by a “referral.” Referrals aren’t just clicks on links or ads. If you hear SparkToro mentioned on an Apple podcast and type-in “sparktoro.com” to your browser window, that’s still a referral, albeit a much-less-common way users navigate the web and much more difficult one to track.
Thankfully, Datos’ panel can account for this kind of referral. Included in this study are any visits that happened in a browsing session (defined by a period of active use).
Those among you who worry over the details of URL-visiting methodology (like me!) might now be concerned that this would overinflate referrals from any and every website to the most popular navigation and consumption platforms (i.e. Google, Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, etc.). What if someone finishes listening to their podcast and clicks on their Gmail bookmark or types in YouTube to unwind with some movie trailers? Good news—we can control for that, too!
By looking at only referrals to sites outside the most-visited ones, we can see how traffic flows from the major traffic referrers to the rest of the web. Let’s explore that next.