Referring Domains

In the recent past I have researched a lot about referrer and referring domains and all the adobe links never gave a straight forward answer. I always had to deduce it so thought why not put it up like a simple 2 line answer instead.

Have you ever noticed in Adobe that  referrer report just reports a lot of URL traffic which is your own website traffic and not where they came from to that URL. If that is not the case in your adobe then your adobe admin has set up the internal URL filter list correctly. 

Internal URL filter is a list of URL's provided to Adobe saying, this is our own website that we are measuring so ignore these URL’s and tell me all the other URL’s which are from other websites. If not already done, then ask your admin and get this one set up for an accurate referrer report.

Once you have set up the internal URL filters, have a look at the referrer report. The first thing that comes to notice is the totals. The visits in this report do not match the total traffic to the website. This took some research to find out as to why the totals don’t match. Eventually google helped me find out that the visits with previous URL as internal URL will never get reported in referrer report, obviously we told them don't report my URL's.

Now what could be a part of this report. Visitors who got logged off and logged in using the logout page, or if your business has multiple websites, then someone who came to this website from your other website would have referrer as internal URL and the filter that you added will stop traffic getting reported in this table. So the difference in the traffic can be assumed to be internal URL traffic. 

How to do a double check  - In the marketing channel report. Marketing channel processing rules also have a rule to capture internal URL list traffic under a bucket called internal traffic.  So go ahead and set up your marketing channels report too in adobe and use these in conjunction to look at your referrer traffic.