Track clicks from partner site to my site

Question

We have a partner website that uses WordPress. They agreed to include a link to our website on their website. We need to track visits from their link to our website. I know how to use google analytics on my website, but I heard somewhere that we can use analytics to track clicks from other sites to our site. I don't know how to do this.

Can you please help me with that?

How can I provide the link to them? should it be normal URL (Ex: https://example.com/page ) or with some referral link (https://example.com/page?someRefLink=1212)

How can I track visits from our partner site to my site either using a given URL or some other way using google analytics? please help me

I tried to use referral code but I'm stuck at the beginning since I don't know how to use google analytics cross-site.

I expect to see the clicks from our partner site to my website in google analytics.

Answer 1

If it's just the volume of traffic you are interested in, i.e. number of sessions then I would recommend decorating the links with Googles own campaign tracking codes. This will cause the traffic to appear in the campaign reports. It also has the advantage of preventing the landing page being duplicated in your page view reporting, which will be the case if you use your own parameters.

The campaign tracking builder can be found here.

Add the link to your site, which will be posted on the referring site, in the website url field. Use at least the source, medium and campaign fields. You could, for example, define them as source == website, medium == $thePartnerName and campaign == signUp. You want to be able to identify the traffic and where it came from.

You can test any subsequently decorated URLs by clicking on them and then observing if your session appears in the real time reports with the correct source/medium. A common issue is that a any redirects which may exist on your site can strip away the parameters.

By the way, without any modification you should still be able to find the traffic in the referral reports. Using campaign tracking gives you better data and the ability to distinquish between different links from the same site, or different campaigns.