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Referrers tab

The Referrers tab of the Parse.ly Dashboard offers insights on how audiences are finding your content. Referrers are broken into five primary categories: Social, Search, Other, Internal, and Direct. Individual referrers can also be saved into custom referrer groups.

The Referrers tab of the Parse.ly Dashboard.
The Referrers tab of the Parse.ly Dashboard.

Learn more about navigating Pulse and Historical views, plus how to filter Dashboard tabs like Referrers:

Referrer categories

Clicking the tile of a referrer category filters the list of individual referrers below. Parse.ly categorizes many domains as defined below.

Clicking a referrer category tile filters the list of individual referrers.
Clicking a referrer category tile filters the list of individual referrers.

Note

Referrer categorizations affect all Parse.ly users, so customizations aren’t currently possible. If you believe a domain has been misclassified, contact Parse.ly Support at support@parsely.com.

Social

Parse.ly tracks a number of referring domains as social networks. That list currently includes:

bsky.applinkinprofile.comreddit.com
facebook.comlinktr.eeshor.by
fantail.sociallnk.biosnapchat.com
gigya.commeneame.netstumbleupon.com
have2have.itnewsin.biot.cn
instagram.comnextdoor.comthreads.net
like2buy.curalate.compinterest.comtwitter.com
likeshop.meplus.google.comweibo.cn
linkedin.compo.stxing.com
linkin.bioqq.com

For some of the above, Parse.ly can provide more granularity than simply the site that’s driving traffic by plugging into the social media site’s API:

Facebook: Facebook likes, shares, and reactions are grouped collectively as “Facebook interactions.” You can sort other Dashboard tabs by Facebook interactions. Facebook does not provide Parse.ly with data about individual Facebook posts that drive traffic to your site.

Pinterest: Pinterest pins appear in the Dashboard as “Pinterest interactions.” You can sort other Dashboard tabs by Pinterest interactions.

Reddit: You can see the links that drove traffic to your site from Reddit by clicking “reddit.com” from the list under the Social referrer category. Once on the Reddit referrer page, click the “Referring URLs” tab so see the URLs that drove the traffic, including specific posts and subreddits.

X/Twitter: Tweets appear in the Dashboard as “Twitter interactions.” You can sort other Dashboard tabs by Twitter interactions. X does not provide Parse.ly with data about individual tweets that drive traffic to your site.

Pro Tip

Don’t see a social domain you want to track in Parse.ly’s list? You can track other social sites by adding UTM parameters to the end of your URLs.

Traffic from search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft Bing falls under the Search referrer category.

Other

Any additional external referral source will be classified here, such as:

  • News aggregators (e.g., Google News, Flipboard, NewsBreak).
  • RSS feeds.
  • Other external sites and applications.

Internal

The Internal category includes any traffic from your site’s domain. This can be from the homepage, in-article links, or marketing automation emails (if set up with a matching subdomain).

Large numbers of internal traffic on a post can be driven by photo galleries or paginated content, where clicking to see the next image or page registers another page view (dynamic tracking), but it can also be a good indication of loyalty throughout a site.

Note

Self-referring page views aren’t included in the Internal page view count. Therefore, adding the number of page views in the Social, Search, Other, Internal, and Direct categories won’t equal the total page views displayed in the Referrers timeline. To get an exact match, include the number of self-referring page views, seen by hovering over the Internal referrers tile.

Direct

Direct traffic has no referrer data. This could happen for a number of reasons:

  • The user typed the URL into their browser or clicked on a browser bookmark.
  • Links were shared via email, SMS, or an app (e.g., TikTok, Truth Social, Mastodon, Discord, etc.).
  • A privacy-centric search engine stripped out referrer information.

Sources of some direct traffic may be identified by adding parameters to your URLs and tracking them on the Campaigns tab.

Last updated: July 01, 2025