Products
Webtrends Analytics 9.x
Webtrends Analytics 8.x
Issue
The domain being trackedappears in the referring domain, referring site, or referring pages report. These reports should be showing traffic coming from other sites.
Resolution
The referring reports are based on the referring page in the first hit of a visit.Usually this is an external site. Subsequent hits in the visit are between pages on your site and are not included in the report. However, there are situations where your site can show as the referrer.
1. The site has landing pages that are not tagged for tracking. For example, the visitor comes to yoursite.com/page1 and this page does not have the Webtrends tracking tag or otherwise is not included in the raw tracking data. The visitor then goes to yoursite.com/page2 which is being tracked. From the tracking information the first page of the visit (used in the referring reports) is /page2 with the referrer of yoursite.com/page1. Add the appropriate tracking tag to the landing page to address this issue.
2. The visit timed out between page views.A visit is a series of hits from the same visitor with less than 30 minutes between hits.If the visitor takes longer than 30 minutes between pages then the next page they load after the 30 minute pause will be a new visit with the referrer (the last page before the long pause) added to the referrer report. This is rare enough that it should not be a significant part of traffic. If it is a large part of the volume then there may be portions of the site that are not tagged or or may be tracked in a way that is not including them in the same visit (e.g., hits go to a different data source that is not included in the profile).
3.The profile is using IP/User Agent as the visitor identification and the IP changes during a visit. If the visitor is coming through a load balancer or proxy that changes the IP during a visit the change will appear to be a new visit. Using First Party Cookies to track unique visitors will reduce this issue.