Incomplete Web Trends reports

No referrer on Top referring site and Top referring URL

[SPACE_GHOST]

I am the new Web Systems Coordinator for a large University and currently the Web Trends reports I am receiving for our site appear to be incomplete. Both pages for "Top Referring Sites" and "Top Referring Url" have the number of hits (18,158) but say 1 No Referrer 18,158
Subtotal for the Referring Sites Above 18,158
Total for the Log File 18,158
I am told by the staff configuring the report that this is because our visitors are coming from AOL so we cannot capture this information. I used to configure this type of report myself but it has been some time ago. I do know from other tracking methods (responses to surveys etc.) that many of our visitors are coming from other sites via click throughs of banner ads etc. I find it hard to believe that everyone is coming through AOL. Is this information not being shown because our web server (Apache on Sun Solaris) is not capturing it in the log files or because the web trends report is not configured correctly (or both)??
Please reply if you know as we need to track the effectiveness of our online advertising.

[Shane]

Hi, I am relatively new to Web Trends as well but I think you have a point. Our Top Referring Sites table lists unknown as number one but then goes on to contain another 500 entires (our techie went wild). Number 10 on our referer list is [aolsearch.aol.com...] and number 49 is [aolsearch.aol.ca...] and number 54 is [search.aol.com,...] okay, you get the idea, so I think something must be configured incorrectly or maybe your DNS lookup not working (do you see IP addresses or site names in other tables)?

Also, what do you see in top search keywords?

Regards,
S

[WebGuerrilla]

AOL can be a big contributor to NR entries if the IP address of the visitor changes during the visit. The initial entry to the site would pass a referrer, (provided it wasn't hand typed or bookmarked) but once the IP changes, all following pageviews would appear to be single page, non referred visitors.

Another big cause of NR entries are bots/spiders. If a deep crawling spider like Fast or Google shows up and crawls a large site, each page request will be listed as NR. Since the site is a large university, I would bet that it gets crawled quite often. Combine that with the AOL factor and students bookmarking or setting the site as their home page, and you could easily come up with 18,000+ NR's.

What you really need to look at is the percentage of NR's compared to the rest of your referral data. Alos, check the WT section on visiting spiders and then subtract the number of visits from you total. That will usually bring the number down quite a bit.