QUOTE(appareloverstock @ Feb 27 2006, 07:44 AM) [snapback]103919[/snapback]
When I look at our company's stats (Urchin 5), I notice that a majority (61% yesterday) of our sessions are coming from "no referral." This seems a bit high to me, so I was wondering if anyone could tell me how this could possibly be.
This is not incongruous with what a lot of clients and web sites in general get. Essentially, what this means is that the server and Urchin software were unable to track a referral for where the user came from.
There used to be a good listing on Urchin's documentation help about this but the site is gone. The domain redirects to Google Analytics (useless
). Still, another client posted most of the details here -
http://forums.monstersmallbusiness.com/ind...indpost&p=57734 - Also, there is a listing in Google's support help glossary for this as well -
http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bi...7303#noreferral - Actually..... hang on a second...
After a bit of searching through the Google support pages for GAnalytics, I found some links to the archived support pages for older versions of Urchin. Here is the same entry referenced in the thread above in it's new location -
http://www.google.com/support/urchin45/bin...pic=7353&type=fSomething else that I believe to possibly contribute to these listings that is not mentioned is the fact that some common commercial security programs (e.g. Norton Internet Security) block the user's referral from being trackable, which would show up as 'no referral' for them everywhere they go.
QUOTE
I also notice that roughly the same amount (a little less) are 0-10 seconds in length of visit. What could all this "not-so-traffic" be?
I understand what you are asking here. Keep in mind the idea of 'set theory'. Just because ~61% of the total sessions are labled 'no referral' and ~61% are short sessions, this does not necessarily mean that they are the SAME 61% subset. I hope that makes sense. In simpler terms, some of the 'no referral' users may have stayed longer than 10 seconds, and some of the users with a listed referral did not stay longer than 10 seconds.
I hope that helps!
s!