Referrer Webtrends

[maurocanzian]

I'm asking myself what referrers of the logs are considered by Webtrends.

The question grows by the number of referrer from my own site.
Does WT report all the referrer in the logs or only the initial referrer of each visits?

In the first case I wouldn't have any referrer from my own site, in the second case I would have a number of referrer from my own site equal to the number of hits.

None is the case of my profiles...

Do you have any ideas?

[cgrantski]

In most versions and most reports of WebTrends, the referrer is for the visit - i.e. the referrer of the first file request of the visit, where "visit" is defined as a set of requests united by a cookie, an IP address-User Agent field concatenation, or both, provided there are no periods of no activity longer than 30 minutes (usually; depends on version of WT).

There is one WT report that can be hacked to tabulate the referrers for all page views in a visit, but it's no fun to do the hack.

So reading between your lines, if you are seeing a lot of referrers that are your own site, WebTrends is either seeing a lot of cookie changes in mid-visit, IP changes in mid-visit, or 30+ minute pauses. All of these cause WT to break up a visit into several visits (I call 'em false visits) and report on a lot of spurious referrers.

What I do for this is just ignore the referrers that are for the site in question and recalculate percentages on the basis of referrers that mean something.

I also change the inactivity threshold from 30 minutes to a couple of hours, but that's just my preference. Those same-site-referrers drop quite a lot.

Hope I am understanding your question.