GA: view settings, domain set incorrectly. Problem?

[FranticFish]

I'm part of a team doing an audit and it was noticed that the website is showing as its own referrer - significantly. Over the past month, of 2.2M sessions, 10% were self-referrals.

There's a lot of embedded live feeds and stats that get updated for events, so the initial explanation was that people are on the site with their window/tab open past 30min and then view another page, or refresh.

I have since noticed that in Account > Property > View, the domain is set to the wrong country. It IS set correctly in Account > Property.

I've run the site through GA Debugger and the domain there is always the one we want. So is the incorrect domain in the View anything to worry about?

[RhinoFish]

Under Acquisition / All Traffic / Referrals, add Full Referrer as Secondary Dimension.
See anything of interest there?

[FranticFish]

Thanks for your reply. No, nothing untoward there in that, for every instance of a self-referred visit, the full url is also one at that domain.

As far as I can see, this is a fairly harmless error. It IS fudging links from inside Analytics to pages in the reports e.g. on 'Behaviour > Site Content > All Pages' the little arrows take you to the wrong domain, but i think that is it.

[RhinoFish]

Any chance your redirects are misconfigured to drop the inbound (no [QSA]), like it you use www and a page of your own points to non-www, and cross sub-domain tracking causes the person to look as if they are arriving for the first time, and where in effect referred from a page from your domain (but not the correct sub-domain)?

I've seen client side redirects do this too, where the re-director page loads, but it itself does not load the GA script.

[FranticFish]

This site (or rather, a family of inter-related domains and subdomains) has multiple issues, and Analytics configuration is just the tip of the iceberg.

I've done some more reading on self-referrals since I posted, and they are a candidate for each one of five reasons I've noted down that this can happen, including the two you mention :)