In this 10 part series, we are exploring simple steps you can take to get your digital house in order – before you start paying for advertising.

Last week in Step 4, we covered ‘Defining Values for every Goal’.

Now lets move on to Step 5.

Feed Your Winners, Starve Your Losers

– Eben Pagan

Exclude Referrers

Once you start seeing your Macro and Micro Conversion goal data coming through, check your top Referrer sources.

Referrer sources are the last “source / medium” referrer a visitor came from before converting on your website.

Particularly for Ecommerce Brands, if you offer customers 3rd party payment alternatives such as PayPal, Afterpay or Zippay – it is these payment services that can often (incorrectly) be your top Referrers.

Above: Ensure you exclude Payment Gateways so these don’t get registered as ‘Referrals’

What is happening here, is that these sources are inadvertently taking credit for the sale as its the last action a customer using these services takes before the final purchase conversion event on your website.

If this happens, you need to exclude such Referrers as they are:

1. Misleading – since they are clearly not the source of incoming traffic to your site, and
2. Cannibalising and hiding the true source of quality traffic which means you are under-estimating the true Referrer source/s.

In some cases, your own website (or separate mini-site that you own) may also be referring traffic ‘back to yourself’. For a similar reason as above, if this is the case, you should exclude your own website as being a referrer.

Now that you have cleaned up your referrer’s list, stay tuned for a tip that could potentially gain you valuable months of data in Before you pay for clicks: Part 6.