Using Google Analytics to track Unique Visits from a referring site
I was confronted with a problem of tracking unique visitors from referring partner sites. A friend was to pay his partners per click and he wanted to know how many unique visitors every partner site was generating. This would help him track efficiency of traffic and click fraud if any.
Currently, Google Analytics does not show unique visits for a referring source but it does show unique views of every content page. Yes, this showed me a light bulb near my forehead.
Google Analytics: Referring Source Details
Google Analytics: Content Details
See? I was not lying about the light bulb…
How to track Unique Views from Referring Sites?
1. You can create a custom tracking URL for partner site like the one shown below:
http://www.mysite.com/landingpage.htm?utm_source=PARTNER1&utm_medium=CPC&utm_campaign=PPC
You can also create this URL by using the Tracking URL Generator tool by Google Analytics.
Note: utm_source parameter in the above URL is the referring source.
2. On your landing page replace the following code with the code below in your GA Script:
REPLACE pageTracker._trackPageview();
WITH pageTracker._trackPageview(utm_source);
The idea is to pass the value of the parameter utm_source (which is the name you gave to referring source) from the URL to the ga.js which is your google analytics script.
3. Another thing you can do to measure the legitimacy of the referring source is that you use the Dimension filter to see the visitor type for a particular referring source. This would give you an idea about New v/s Returning visitors that partner is sending to your site. If you see a high number of Returning Visitors for one particular referring site then there is a probability of manual click fraud. Of course this is only true when these returning visitors are showing no conversions or high bounce rate.
I suggested the above to my friend, hope it works 
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