Google Analytics - referring source isn't that good

[gfidan]

I was thrilled that google decided to give away the analytics for free until I saw the Referring source data. This is the most important data in my opinion and it only shows the domain and not the full URL of the referring source.

This just doesn't cut it. My site receives a lot of press and if the referring source says nytimes.com, what good does that do me? I need to go to the referring site and try to search out the article in which my site was mentioned. A lot of sites have terrible search functionality so I can't even find the articles.

Does anybody know if there is a way to display the full URL in referring source for Google Analytics?

[vitaplease]

totally agree, and even if it can be found somewhere, it is not intuitive.

[teylyn]

gfidan,

I find the navigation in Google Analytics very confusing and always forget which report actually yields what kind of information. But it seems to me that what you're looking for can be found here. Click

Marketing Optimization - Marketing Campaign Results - Referral Conversion

You see a list of the web sites from which direct referrals came and you can click the + sign to drill down to the page that actually triggered the referral.

Hope that helps.

cheers

Teylyn

[vitaplease]

good tip teylyn,

just shows how well they've hidden it.

Still needs some improvement:

- the referral is a broken incomplete unclickable URL.
- no way to see a complete list of exact referrals
- no way to see which exact referrals are new today
- search engines show as referrals

is it me or am I sometimes missing the hourglass icon whilst waiting for the results?

[gfidan]

teylyn,

thanks for the tip. While that certainly helps, I have to agree with vitaplease in that it needs some improvement.

One other thing I hate is that almost all stat providers cannot provide the full URL for referrals originating from PHP scripts such as message boards. I get a lot of referrals this way and there is no way to find the specific message board posting without going to the originating site and doing a search.

oh well, I can't be too pissed though, I do love the fact that Google has released this. I was never able to use any of the other stat services because I get way too many pageviews (15 million +) making the cost was too high.

[teylyn]

- the referral is a broken incomplete unclickable URL.

It's not clickable, but I see not broken URLs (so far ...)

- no way to see which exact referrals are new today

Well, if you select just the one day in the date range, that would do the trick. Bit cumbersome, tho :(

- search engines show as referrals

Yeah, I get all these images.google.xx referrals. Annoying, since they clutter up the analysis, AFAIK!