In the age of data the more information you can see about visitors to your website, the more you can do to enhance it. With this is mind we have been looking at useful bits of information that we can track and view. The most recent bit of data we have began using is the users referrer. This tells us the channel the visitor used to access the website came from, whether that be Google, Yahoo, Bing or a link from a third party website.
By populating fields in our forms showing the channel that they came from our clients can see this information and get a better idea of where their website traffic is coming from as well as an understanding of where their new customers may be coming from. This could show that paid searches are the main source of conversions on the website, or it may show that most people are coming direct, perhaps showing that other marketing campaigns are successfull.
While this feature is not completely fool proof, it is supported by all major browsers so should give a fairly accurate representation of website traffic. However it is worth knowing that those with specific security settings are able to disable this feature which will skew results slightly. Even though we cannot guarantee 100% accuracy on the data provided from this method, we feel it could give a crucial understanding to our clients about their customers.