Visitors - No Referer

[majikmushroom]

When analyzing my website files, about 80% of my visitors come up as no referer. Can someone explain what this means. How do they get to the site? Its probably a stupid question, for they got there somehow, but am curious. Thanks, Reed

[wsmeyer]

No Referer means they didn't click on a link to get to your site, they typed the url directly into their browser. This is good, but 80% raises some questions.

That high a percentage is great if you actually have that much brand recognition, like if you're looking for the Starbucks website and you type starbucks.com into your browser.

You didn't mention which site you were talking about but just for the heck of it I typed magik mushroom into google. Apparently there is a band in the UK with that name. If that's the site you were talking about there should be a way in your stats to see where traffic is coming from. Since you're in the US traffic from the UK are probably dissapointed to see furniture!

William.

[brian.mark]

The primary source for most "No referrer" visits is indeed type-in traffic. But that's not all.

Secondary sources for "No referrers" would include the following (and there are more, I'm sure).

1) Blocked / Disabled referrers (Norton and others do this now).

2) Bookmarks

3) Email links (Some stats programs can't handle it and call that "No Referrer")

4) Pop-ups

5) Images in email (That's a hit to your site, but no referrer is usually set - other than web based email programs like gmail, hotmail, yahoo mail and the like).

There are some others, but these are the sources for "No Referrer" that I commonly see in smaller quantities each than type-in, although collectively usually more visits are accounted for this way.

Brian.

[bijunair]

I agree with Brain.Mark's reply.

No referers completely don't mean the traffic comming from type in url but it also means the traffic coming from unassigned email sources.

We can track email clicks also provided we assign some tracking come to campaigned emails.

Regards
Bijunair

[taxivantha]

I am creating my own webstat analysis program and therefore I am trying to delve a little bit deeper into the ins and outs of what appears in the logfiles.

I was surprised myself about the high number of visits without referer. I certainly do not understand yet where all those visits come from, but a high percentage come from web crawlers. Especially inktomi drives that record numbers. Inktomi seems to use a different ip for every web page they visit and for almost every time they read robots.txt.

If your website does not attract thousands of visitors per day, the crawls will lead to those high percentages!

This does not explain all the visits without referer. Some visitors seem to browse my site without any referer, not even from within my site.

[brian.mark]

Originally Posted by taxivantha

I am creating my own webstat analysis program and therefore I am trying to delve a little bit deeper into the ins and outs of what appears in the logfiles.

I was surprised myself about the high number of visits without referer. I certainly do not understand yet where all those visits come from, but a high percentage come from web crawlers. Especially inktomi drives that record numbers. Inktomi seems to use a different ip for every web page they visit and for almost every time they read robots.txt.

If your website does not attract thousands of visitors per day, the crawls will lead to those high percentages!

This does not explain all the visits without referer. Some visitors seem to browse my site without any referer, not even from within my site.

Good point. I guess I was assuming that people were looking at those visits done by browsers, as most analytics packages don't bother reporting referrer data for bots. That'd really skew the stats.

Brian.