New traffic sources

Question

How can I track new traffic sources for my site? (with google analytics or other tool)

For example, if site is mentioned on forum it gets some visits from here, but it isn't visible (easy) in traffic sources report because number of visits relatively small.

Answer 1

In Google Analytics:

1. Go to Traffic Source > Referring Sites
2. Change the date filter (drop down in the top right) to the time you're interested in (e.g. today's date only).

You could also use real-time analytics services such as Woopra and Clicky, both of which offer live referrer information in their control panels.

Answer 2

The easiest way I know would be to compare traffic from referring sites. Set the date range you want to know the new traffic sources, then compare it to the previous year (or however long you have history for if you want to be sure they are new) then you can see which ones have traffic in the current time frame and no traffic in he previous. (To make things easier I believe you can get live data from GA imported directly into Google Docs, setup your sorting/macros and you could have a maintenance free live report).

Answer 3

You should be able to see all the traffic sources in the "All Traffic Sources" report regardless of how few visits you have. The problems you could have are as follows:

1. You don't have the GA tag set up properly on your pages.
2. Occasionally people set their browsers to block the referral source. There's not much that can be done about that.
3. Some sites use a redirect to deliberately remove the referral source. This is often done by affiliates that don't want advertisers to know how they are generating visits.