How to See Referral Sources in Google Analytics 4
Finding your way around reports is one of the most frustrating things about switching from Universal Analytics to Google Analytics 4. It often feels like simple information, such as who is visiting your site through a referral link, is suddenly much harder to find. But don’t worry, it's not actually more difficult — just organized in a different place you may not have been trained on.
This tutorial will show you exactly where to find a comprehensive report on GA4 so you can find a list of every website sending traffic to your business. We’ll cover using the standard built-in reports for a quick view and how to set up your own customizable ‘Referral report’ so that information will be just a couple of clicks away on your account dashboard in the future.
What is Referral Traffic and Why Does it Matter?
Referral traffic simply groups together visitors who got to your website by following a link from a different website. Essentially it’s someone you aren’t paying that chooses, for one reason or another, to promote your site for you.
Tracking your referrals is an integral but often overlooked part of digital marketing. Having that report at your fingertips with GA4 will give you incredibly valuable (also read, completely free) real-time information you can use for your business goals:
Finds SEO Opportunities: Each referral source is a website mentioning you or your content and offering a link. This can be perfect for finding new backlinks to explore since you will already know by default they are interested in your brand in one capacity or another.
Identify Partnership and PR Opportunities: Monitoring the list of referral sites can showcase who shares your content with the same audience or who has a vested interest in the topics that you report on, making them a wellspring for new connections and relationships to grow your brand over time.
Gauge Content Performance: Referrals can show you what kind of external audience your content draws since high-traffic referral sources have large and trusted readerships giving your pieces high-quality exposure with their audience for free!
Find Your Top Referral Sources in Seconds
Fortunately, GA4 has not thrown everything out the window trying to reorganize Universal Analytics, for the most part, you'll feel right at home with the default reporting tools at your disposal, and if you just want to take a look at the referral data it will be exactly where you last left it. And of course, once you start feeling comfortable you're able to customize the reporting to a staggering degree, so don't feel locked into GA4's default format.
Step-by-Step Referral Traffic Reporting
When you're first finding a referral source on GA's home dashboard it pays not to reinvent the wheel, but start simple and build on the analytics later. Here's a brief example report anyone with little to no GA skills can find quickly:
1. Go to "Traffic acquisition"
Log in to your GA4 property, look on the left-hand navigation pane, and go here: Reports > Acquisition > Traffic Acquisition.
2. View your Traffic Channels
This is GA’s high-level report showing your traffic broken down by "channel family" such as organic search, e-mail traffic, paid ads, and much more.
Out of everything, you're tracking right out of the box with the default Google configuration, right now all you'll care about today is a single row specifically labeled 'Referral' since this neatly combines all external-linking websites such as any partners linking your recent campaign pages and also social media platforms that have been sharing your blog post last week.
At a minimum, it is possible for you with little more investigation on the report we have made to understand at least one very essential piece. Just above your table on your GA4 is going to be some visualization trends and as you start to explore those you'll begin finding that traffic overview information for each source to better monitor whether your overall goals, such as finding a new list of content partners for social campaigns from Instagram or LinkedIn sharing your article, is bringing what you need when you really need those results this quarter — and what channels your referrals aren't coming onto your site from.
3. Now Add Your ‘Session Source’ Dimension
The "Default Channel Grouping," while useful for any brand looking in for a brief traffic report, rolls every referrer under a single line to give you their total. It tells you where your traffic is coming from but not exactly what drove it, such as whether it's from an email campaign or a simple link seen on newsletters. Here's how you can customize it to see each website referring traffic:
In your Traffic acquisition report, click the “+” icon beside the “Session primary dimension” and add a new menu item.
Type “Source” in the menu search input, select “Session Source” from Traffic Source, and this adds the dimension.
Now your table will have both the default Channel group and a new column for each source. Sort by “Sessions” to see all of your referrals and you're good to go!
4. Finally Filter by Only the Referral Traffic Report
For a final touch to just show referral traffic, add a filter. In your traffic acquisition page, just go slightly above your visualization chart in GA4 and select the option "Add filter."
In the filter menu, type “Session default” in the search bar, select it, and in the dropdown menu choose "Referral" to apply the filter. Now, your table will just list all of your referring domains individually.
Creating a Reusable Referral Report
One last step you can take is to customize it as a custom report so you don’t have to repeat this process again. In the upper right corner of the screen, click the pencil icon to save the new report and add it to your menu.
Analyzing and Utilizing Your Data
Now with your custom report you no longer just have a list of domains but can start making better insights for your teams and make great decisions from your marketing and sales campaigns from the referral data. A few questions you should consider when analyzing this:
Are the top referrals sending relevant, qualified traffic aligning with your current marketing goals for new audiences, or is someone on your list giving you good exposure to a niche community where you can build authority?
What sort of content is the referral sharing and with what kind of audience are they engaging? Can you find more websites like it that your PR department can reach out to for upcoming new product launches?
Finding Your Insights in a Crowded Room of Opportunity
Now, you won’t need the IT team to search this for you! In your custom report on GA, just search for that brand name as a source in your referral traffic, the page they visit, and how long they stay. This is how you gain these amazing insights that your data provides. It’s a tool, and with that knowledge, you start creating great reports that impress during stakeholder meetings.
Final Thoughts
Knowing your referral sources on GA4 isn't intimidating once you know where to look and how to create these simple reports in GA4 for easy access in the future. They are now a valuable asset in your data analyst’s toolkit which can help answer almost any question your business needs. It’s not just a graph or list of websites now, the insights from the data tell a story and you finally have its full context.
We understand that many marketers and business owners find this manual report pulling over and over a bit tedious and it's no longer worth it when we can help you out! With that in mind, we have built Graphed — we automate a lot of the heavy lifting for you by connecting all data sources like your GA with sales and other marketing staff to get those answers in minutes, not hours with these manual steps. Say goodbye to manual chart creation and hello to real-time dashboards that streamline your data and give you time to focus on making data-driven plans, not just managing them!