Hi: I did see some older posts on this issue of "no referral", but I woud like some clarification and wondering how others have interpreted it. Our number has always been between 85 and 90%, making me think that the referral data really aren't all that useful! Is there anything known about these mysterious visitors?

And a related question - these include spiders and robots, correct?

What I am really trying to do is to figure out a way of at least estimating how many human eyes view our site each day. What numbers there will tell me that?

I have been puzzling over this for years (so I hope someone can shed some light on it as I really need to know in order to make some decisions.

Thanks,

Marilyn

Hello Marilyn,

If you have a referral in your Urchin stats that has "no referral", it means that the person accessed your site directly either thru a bookmark or typing in the domain name directly.

If you have any further questions, please feel free to ask.

Thanks for your reply, Jennifer. Yes, well, what you say is the obvious interpretation, and one that I just assumed for a long time. But I have a hard time believing it. The number is consistently in the 85-90% range.

Here are my referral numbers for the last 5 months (July is estimated from traffic so far):

Month Total No referral All others
March 59314 48104 11210
April 54571 43807 10764
May 51194 42345 8849
June 54404 41220 13184
July 53750 46969 6781 (est.)

We do have a nice stream of customers and orders, but I can't really imagine that many people have us bookmarked or memorized. That would be 1600 people per day who not only have us bookmarked but visit from the bookmark - I don't understand why. Is that in line with other sites? I read another post here, a few years old, saying that "no referrals" often meant that the origin could not be determined, rather than the more logical explanation that someone typed in the url. That one I can believe. But I have a hard time believing that this many people have us bookmarked.

So that's my question - just how reliable is this? Is it really bookmarks/direct typing, or is it a combination of that and others that just could not be interpreted or determined?

Thanks again,

Marilyn

Marilyn,

If you look for the Urchin definition:

Referrals
This report ranks referring URLs (external web pages) that brought traffic to your site. For Sessions without an external referral, which occurs when a Visitor goes directly to your site via a bookmark/favorite or by typing in the URL directly, the (no referral) entry is incremented. This allows you to compare the percentage of traffic from external links versus Visitors that already know about your site. Click any referring page to view it in a new browser window.


You can also throw in robots to that list; that is probably where your large number of "no referrals" is coming from.

For more information about Urchin 5; here is a good location: http://www.google.com/support/urchin45

Thanks

Marilyn ... it also refers to you and your employees, repeat customers who bookmarked you or rembered the name of your website, Word of mouth, your competitors who know your site's name and people who have software to block this information so you can't "spy on them".

Do you ask your customers where they heard about you in a checkout question? I love it when they put in word of mouth. It's a great feeling when others recommend my site!

If we had access to our own logs it would be a lot easier to narrow down what's what. Try not to get too hung up on those kind of stats. A lot of customers aren't even wanted customers. I have a lot of hitts from Asia for the term "power strip". I have never sold a power strip to anyone in Asia.

hope this helps.

Thanks for the clarification and tips. It is about as I thought but I am glad to understand more!

Marilyn

There are a couple of other situations that must be considered:

1> Clickthroughs from email read in a non-web client.

If someone clicks a link in an email read in Outlook - there will be no referrer because there is no originating site.

Note that this also holds true if you embed an image or other object in an html-format email, *and* the client has enabled loading of images.

This does not hold true for clients using web-based email.

2> Browser homepage set to your own site.

If all the employees at Acme have www.acme.com set as their home page, each time they open the browser *and* start a new session, there will be no referrer for that session.

This can also be the cause of very long sessions. In the above scenario, if the users are hitting www.acme.com more often than the session length used by the anyalysis software (usually 30 minutes) they will have a session length lasting the whole work day.

I could tell you exactly what is happening if I had access to the raw log files, but the only raw logs I know of that we can get to is the access logs - which are logs of admin activity - not visitor traffic.

3> Pop-up browser windows - these often do not pass the referrer info.

4> Firewalls that strip the data from the referrer field of the http request from the client - note that this can and often is set up on corporate hardware firewalls. This means that if your business is such that you have a large number of visitors originating from the same corp network, you can have a large number of no_ref entries.

5> Out of order log entries. Part of the data web servers log is the time to service the http request. There is a single log entry per request . Logically, in order to know what length to log, the web server can only log a request *after* it has been serviced. This can and does cause out of order entries that can cause analysis to fail or give odd results.

Given that we are talking shopping carts here, I suspect that emails are the most likely suspects.

I have done a lot of log analysis - but am just getting my feet wet with - if I notice anything else after I get more familiar, I will update this thread.