Comments on: Reasons for seeing your own site in Referrer reports … and what you can do about it

By: ChicagoGirl

ChicagoGirl — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 21:09:37 +0000

Has anyone seen any data on browser tabs? Would opening the link in a tab and coming back to it later trigger a new visit? I think 30 minutes is pretty average for how long it takes to come back to a browser tab that you opened with a bunch of other things.

By: rocky

rocky — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 14:23:22 +0000

Thanks for the compliment!

WT.mc_id and Visitor History have to connect visits based on a persistent cookie that WebTrends can read. It all depends on how you have set up your Session Tracking (what cookie it uses). I’m not sure about the third party aspect.

However, WT.mc_id still works fine for all the Campaign ID pre-configured reports that do NOT depend on visitor history, i.e. reports that only pay attention to the Campaign ID (the WT.mc_id value) of the present visit.

By: Mini_Cooper_Boy

Mini_Cooper_Boy — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 09:33:47 +0000

Rocky, That helps massively thanks a lot. I had a bit of a panic moment when i read those last few comments I’m just about to have a bit of an investigation regarding referring sites using the post you mentioned above.

I’ll also have to have a natter with the web dev guys to talk about possibly getting things changed to use WT.mc_id. Just one question, we have to use third party cookies will this cause any issues with WT.mc_id?

I’m pretty new to Web Stats, and its definitely an interesting learning experience

Top site BTW

By: rocky

rocky — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 16:55:36 +0000

Also, MCB, if the other site has a relationship with you, your best solution is to forget about the referrer aspect of tracking, which is unreliable. Ask them to put a marker parameter into their link. If you use the parameter WT.mc_id, WebTrends will consider it a campaign and will store that fact in the Visitor History table, which is neat because you can look at the “latent” effects of that affiliate site.

So, ask them to change the link to the home page to be: http://www.mysite.co.uk/?WT.mc_id=thatothersitename

And the link to the subsection of your site could be changed to http://www.mysite.co.uk/subsection/index.asp?WT.mc_id=thatothersitename.

You can use any value you want for the parameter WT.mc_id, including have different ones for each landing page.

Does that help?

By: rocky

rocky — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 16:50:23 +0000

Heya MCB, for now, ignore those last few comments. The bottom line is that if somebody has a link to your site, THEIR site will be the referrer. That is, if the referrer gets collected at all. You may be getting confused by a situation where the referrer is not being collected. See if this post helps you at all — http://www.webtrendsoutsider.com/2008/reasons-for-direct-traffic-in-referrers-reports/