Webtrends Accuracy

One of the most important Webtrends statistics for me is Referrer, because it gives me an idea of how people get to our sites.

Unfortunatly, for various sites, between 15% and 35% of visits say "No Referrer".

At first, I thought this meant that people are entering the URL for our site directly into the address line, but it seems highly unlikely that thousands of people are doing this monthy. Apparently, for various reasons, the Referrer is often blocked.

If so, then how can I judge which URLs are providing the most referrals and which ones the least? Perhaps there are some websites providing many referrals, but they are being blocked.

Any insights into this issue would be welcome. Thank you.

(BTW, I posted this here, as I could not find any forum which seemed more suitable.)

Good question? Approximately 1/2 of our traffic, according to our analysis tool,(SmarterStats installed by our host) says No referror. I'm pleased to hear that a big name analysis tool, like webtrends, also has a large number of No Referrors. About 1/4 of our traffic comes from the various URL's in our site. I have a running total of each URL (it seems to make sense- Home page has the most direct traffic.)

I do know we get many repeat visitors. I've heard it from our customers and I've looked at the analysis that shows # of visits per visitor and similar information. Some customers mentioned they looked at the site once or twice a month for years. Still that is an enormous amount. We have somewhat over 450 different sources of traffic. Certainly the analysis tool is capable of identifying a lot of sources.

RustyBrick has written about Urchin and strongly suggests it. I'm going to contact him with regard to this issue, which I frankly haven't focused on for some time.

Are you sure your site isn't the type of site that people would bookmark for repeat visits - that might explain the lack of referrer?

BTW, the referrer is easily blocked (some anti-spyware programs will actually put there name in their instead) or spoofed for nefarious reasons - see my page on referrer log spamming for more info.

Yah, Urchin has a great program. We just dropped webtrends for Urchin as it has really become rediculous in pricing. They have more or less the same feature which webtrends are calling Smartsource or something. This uses a px by px image on the webpage to gather information instead of log files. Apperently this is more accurate, still have to see... I also believe if you open a link in a new window it doesn't record the referrer. If I am wrong ... bite me...