--- title: How to hack Google Analytics to find high quality traffic description: Referral links from quality sources are content marketing gold. But how do you identify the sources and better yet, find similar ones to get more traffic? image: https://www.256content.com/hubfs/Imported_Blog_Media/Rand_Fishkin.png --- [![256 logo](https://www.256content.com/hs-fs/hubfs/Giff-Logo.gif?width=95&name=Giff-Logo.gif "256 logo") ![256 logo](https://www.256content.com/hs-fs/hubfs/256-logo--white.png?width=95&name=256-logo--white.png "256 logo")](https://www.256content.com) - Services - [Content Strategy](https://www.256content.com/services/content-strategy) - [Personas](https://www.256content.com/services/personas) - [Content Managed Service](https://www.256content.com/services/content-managed-service) - [Content Operations](https://www.256content.com/services/content-operations) - [Campaign 360](https://www.256content.com/services/digital-marketing-advertising-agency) - [Data Analytics](https://www.256content.com/services/data-analytics) - [Custom Dashboards](https://www.256content.com/services/dash) - [Market Intelligence](https://www.256content.com/services/competitor-analysis) - [Siteseer](https://www.256content.com/services/content-audit) - [Internal Communications](https://www.256content.com/services/internal-communications) - [Shine Video Production](https://www.256content.com/services/video-production) - [Unlocking Team Talent](https://www.256content.com/services/video-production/intfluencers) - [Social Media Services](https://www.256content.com/services/social-media) - [Case Studies](https://www.256content.com/case-studies) - [Blog](https://www.256content.com/blog) - [Contact](https://www.256content.com/contact) - [About Us](https://www.256content.com/about-us) - [Our Values](https://www.256content.com/our-values) - [Careers](https://www.256content.com/careers) - [Resources](https://www.256content.com/resources) [B2C](https://www.256content.com/academy/tag/b2c) # How to hack Google Analytics to find high quality traffic ![Author avatar](https://www.256content.com/hubfs/256%20Logos/Square/256_RGB_GRADIENT_SQUARE_700px.png) ### Posted by **256** ### July 22nd, 2020 Referral links from quality sources are content marketing gold. But how do you identify the sources and better yet, find similar ones to get even more quality traffic? It’s no surprise that all round SEO whizz, Rand Fishkin has the answer. Watch the video or read the transcript to find out how to put this top tip into practice yourself.   ## Video Transcription Howdy, I'm Rand Fishkin, founder of SparkToro, and I'm going to show you a cool tip for digging through your analytics, finding sites that send you great traffic, and then figuring out other awesome sources of traffic that reach similar audiences. ## Step 1 – Finding referrals on Google Analytics So let's go over here to my Google analytics, you can see which page I'm in. I'm in the acquisition, all traffic, referrals section. This is for SparkToro. And what I'm looking for here are websites that have sent me high quality traffic. Traffic that's had a high conversion rate, a low bounce rate, lots of pages per session, right those kinds of metrics. So I'm going to scroll down and I see down here this site brandwatch.com and they've sent some really high quality traffic. ## Step 2 – Go really niche to find gold I'm not really all that interested in stuff like Twitter, or Facebook, LinkedIn, they're too broad. I want to find one specific site, so Brandwatch is a really good one. I pop over here, check out Brandwatch and they've got a bunch of content, they have a nice blog. The blog ended up linking to SparkToro and that's what sent us all these high quality visitors who ended up registering for SparkToro's product. ## Step 3 – Finding more sources of quality traffic So now I'm going to take brandwatch.com and I'm going to go, frequently visits the website. This is in my SparkToro account, which you can set up for free. Brandwatch.com, and what it's essentially going to do is SparkToro will show me websites, social accounts, podcasts, YouTube channels that are popular with the 6,000 or so sources from the last 120 days that SparkToro knows about, that have visited or shared linked to brandwatch.com. So we can see in here, Oh, these look pretty sweet. So these are social accounts that we're engaged with. I haven't been on social media today. I should really actually go do that, right. But the concept here is really simple. I've taken a website that sent me good traffic from my analytics, I've plugged it into SparkToro, and now I can see other media sources, other social accounts, other websites, other podcasts that are likely to send me good, similar, high quality traffic. Pretty awesome, right? ![256](https://www.256content.com/hubfs/256%20Logos/Square/256_RGB_GRADIENT_SQUARE_700px.png) ## 256 We're 256 - \*the\* content marketing agency. 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