Every. Single. Day. someone asks why this metric doesn’t correlate to that metric, or if this metric is this number and that metric is another number then why the third calculated metric is different to the calculation.

Generally all metrics are shit, and about to get a hell of a lot shitter with the EU Cookie crapery, but that’s a whole different post

None are more shitter than Referral Tracking

Q: What is a Referrer?
A: In this instance, we’re talking about the last site you visited, in an ideal world, your browser would remember every site you visit, in order and tell the next site, which site you were last on. This is a browser function, it’s client side functionality, it’s the individuals browser that remembers the last site you were on and gives that information to the next site visited.

So hang on, you’ve generated a reliance on a metric that requires each and every single person who visits your sites browser to blag where they came from?

Hopefully, you’re starting to see why this is bullshit.

Lots of people, quite rightly, don’t want a site to know where they’ve come from, or the last site they were on, all manner of malarky could ensue so mechanisms exist to make sure that the referrer is not kept or transmitted by the browser.

Or you might be on a secure site, which links out to another site, that second site shouldn’t really be passed the secure site as the referrer, that might make it … insecure

Referrer tracking is great for web owners, many a happy hour can be spent grepping the log for referrers and then visiting them to see what they are (you can see the stupidity in this also, web owner ping pong)

Referrer log spamming used to be a great laugh, especially on those .edu or .ac.uk sites which published their AWStats, inbound from a University domain anyone?

Anyway, the myriad of things that strip the refferer include things like personal privacy software, corporate firewall, browser settings, some browser plugins, some redirects, etc etc etc

Referrer tracking is shit, but it’s some kind of barometric

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