Re: Referrer report - what it shows exactly and why it lists only foreign sites

On 7/15/2008 5:03 PM, Natalia Lis wrote:
>   Hello,
>  
> First, I would like to confirm something. I monitor a site which 
> displays a lot of graphs which are shared with other websites. If a 
> person visits such a website and looks at our graphs, the website will 
> be listed in a referrer report even if the person never visited our 
> site?

If a web page at http://abcd.com/graphs.html has one of your images 
"embedded" in it, with code like this

< img src=http://xyz.com/graph001.jpg >

then a user that visits that web page will send a request to your web 
server (xyz.com, in the example above) and the referrer field of that 
request will be http://abcd.com/graphs.html.

If the owner of abcd.com copies you graph and puts it on his own site, 
so that the html code looks like

< img src=graph001.jpg >

then the web logs at xyz.com will never see the request, and there won't 
be any log entry for a referrer to be part of.

> In other words, report tracks the source of all requests and not 
> just requests for pages? I'm asking because in a past discussion I saw 
> that somebody expected the number of requests in a Referrer report to 
> come close of the number of "requests for pages" (as if it was tracking 
> requests for pages only) and this surprised me.

For most websites, most of the referrals are "internal" - if you have 10 
images on your home page, then a request for your home page will 
generate 10 additional requests, one for each image, and the referrer 
for each of those image requests will be your home page. Even if the 
referrer for the first request was some search engine, or a book mark or 
  something else, 10 of the 11 requests in your log file will have your 
home page as the referrer. On the flip side, there's only one "Page 
Request" in those 11 Requests, and the referrer on the Page Request 
isn't internal.

> Second, is it normal that the number of requests in the Referrer report 
> is only a fraction (5%) of total requests?

There are no "requests" in the Referrer report, as such. The entries in 
the referrer report are URLs, and the "Requests" column indicates how 
many times each listed URL occurred in your logfile. It would be 
somewhat unusual to only have referrers on 5% of your log file entries, 
but you should also check that your "floor" for the Referrer report is 
low enough list all the referrers. (By default, Analog only lists 
referrers if they occur more than 20 times in your logfile). If you're 
getting a million requests a day, then a floor of 20 shouldn't mask 
much. If you're getting a couple of hundred hits, and they're from a lot 
of different referrers, then you might find that some of your traffic is 
falling below this floor.

You can change the floor with REFFLOOR 1r

> Third, let's say that I am trying to find out all the major sites which 
> display our graphs. Does the report list all of them? We have an English 
> website which targets North-American market; yet, the sites listed in 
> the Referrer report are almost all from East-Asia. This is not entirely 
> impossible, but I find it curious and this is why I wonder whether the 
> report is set correctly or whether we miss something.

The Referrer report lists all of the referrers that occur in your 
logfile - if only 5% of the requests in your logfile contain referrers, 
then the referrer report probably won't tell you anything that you 
should rely on.

You might find the Referring Site Report (REFSITE ON) more useful if 
yoru images are being embedded in dynamically generated pages that tend 
to have unique URLs.

Aengus

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