Where Do Disqus Traffic Referrals Come From?

Disqus is a steady referral traffic source for the lonelybrand blog. It’s high quality traffic, with people visiting an average of 12 pages per visit and sticking around long enough to presumably read each of those articles. But I wasn’t sure exactly what lonelybrandsite.disqus.com meant in terms of referrals. Are these people clicking links on comments within our blog? On other blogs that we comment on? Following through on Disqus’ recommended content widget? I headed to the source to find some more specific answers. 

According to Disqus’ FAQ section, this traffic is technically referred from Disqus because any time someone clicks a link within the tool, that click is first routed through Disqus and then back to the site link. For this reason, whenever a user clicks on a link within Disqus, whether on your site or someone else’s, that click counts as a Disqus referral. This includes links in a discucssion, in the My Disqus tab, links in user profiles and links in the Discovery (recommended content) box.

As you’ll notice that in Google Analytics, you when you click through to get more information about the source you’re only given a general referral path (/admin/moderate) and can’t see exactly where the visitor was when she clicked on that link. This would obviously be a useful bit of data to have, and Disqus is said to be working on a solution.

Speaking of links, do you know how to follow up on inbound links once you identify them? Check out our post for suggested protocol.