Website Statistics: No Referrer

Each time a visitor comes to your website your web stats will try to record a "referrer", in other words: who sent them to your website. If you have good web stats (ie. Urchin, Webalizer, etc.) you'll see that each month (week, or day) you have many visitors that come through without a referrer. These are usually logged as "No referrer". Many people have contacted me thinking something is wrong, and that's probably not the case.

No need to panic, only to understand. "No referrer" occurs for a different reasons:

1) Referrer Information Can Get Lost

For one of probably a million reasons your web stats couldn't determine where a visitor came from. This might happen if the site they came from uses "new windows" to open links (which is a good idea on your links (away) page). It can also happen when scripts or other programming techniques are used at a website or used to pass a link. I personally believe this is the reason for most "no referrer" traffic.

2) A Visitor Has Manually Typed In Your Website Address

This is a good thing, and a bad thing. The good thing is that someone knows your website address (URL). The unfortunate thing is that you'll be hard pressed to find out much else about them. Again, "no referrer".

3) Your website has been set by someone as their browser "home page".

This is unlikely, for most wedding websites, but. . . hey, it can happen!

4) You're A Favorite

Bookmarks are another source of "no referrer". Bookmarks save the addresses of your favorite sites, so you can return to them quickly without having to retype the address. Bookmarks are a function of your web browser software, and used to hold frequently-accessed Web site addresses. They're also known as Favorites or Hotlists. Brides use bookmarks, I've seen them first hand. That's why it's so important to have an "Click Here To Bookmark This Site" feature on your homepage (and make it easy for them to bookmark your site).

5) Traffic From eNewsletters

If you're website URL is promoted or mentioned in an e-newsletter the chances are anyone who comes to your website as a result of clicking on that link will arrive as a "no referrer". I've seen the referrer be something like: mail12.yahoo.com, which doesn't tell me much, other than someone using Yahoo! Mail has visited my site. It could have been from an e-newsletter, a referral from a friend, family member, or just about anyone. As you can see, not much to work with here.

6) Traffic "Passed" With A Script

I mentioned this above, but it's worth mentioning again.

When websites use scripts or other programmed techniques to pass a visitor to your website, all sorts of things change. There's a good chance you won't get a referrer, so again, *no referrer" gets logged.

More valuable to understand relative to passed links is that anything other than a *direct* link doesn't create any *backward* link value (an important part of any search engine optimization strategy). Backward links is an entirely different topic, altogether.

Here's a tip: If you buy online advertising consider tagging the link you use with the advertiser's name. I recommend that people who advertise at my popular WEDDINGPLANNINGLINKS.COM directory use a URL like:

http://www.drsmusic.com/?weddingplanninglinks


Using this technique you should be able to easily identify, in your referrers log, any traffic sent from the advertiser. As long as your website is not using a complicated content management system (most don't) a user's web browser will ignore anything passed after the question-mark, as used here, and your web stats should pick up and record the visitor session. If you advertise in any e-newsletters this technique is very valuable.

Chris Jaeger
Practical Online Marketing
http://www.practicalonlinemarketing.com
(978) 283-8295