Don’t you hate it when you check your referral reports and see a double listing of your site? Don’t you hate it when you check your referral reports and see a double listing of your site? Don’t you hate it….
…when you get a joke? Ok, that opening was certainly for effect of this post. But the impact of duplication in analytics still remains a serious topic.
Referral traffic reports can reveal which sites are sending traffic consistently. But checking out those sites can give you more than just the numbers.
Duplicate self referrals can cause reporting inconsistency. They can be reported as new sessions, making double dimensions and skewing resulting metrics too high in visit count. They can also make clickstream flow less accurate.
There are a few instances that users should check into to make sure their site is not repeated appearing in the reports.
- The simplest check is within universal analytics (analytics.js). Add referral exclusion in the admin filter to remove a second address. To access the list, click admin, then property, and then tracking info.
- 301/302 redirects should help combine dual mentions of a home page (www.site.com and www.site.com/index.html)
- Non server-side redirects such as meta refresh can create dual referrals. Usually used for temporary redirects, a meta refresh sends a page visitor to a new page - if both the referral and new page have the code, both visits will register separately. Review the URL in the meta refresh and see if it can be addressed in a report setting or as a referral exclusion
- If there are frames in the site structure, multiple views can appear as different referral sources. See if these can be filtered in the reports to be combined as a dimension or highlighted through a filter.
