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Finding Referring URLs with Google Analytics - Sort Of
December 12, 2006
About a month ago, I was very happy to see the official Google Analytics blog come out with a post about finding the exact referring URL. It's one of the reports I use most regularly, and it has always surprised me that it's buried so deeply in the menu structure of Google Analytics. I was nearly giddy when I saw what the post was going to discuss, but then disappointed, because it didn't address my bigger concern, which I'll discuss further down.
A little background: Google Analytics makes it very easy to see which domains are referring traffic to your site. But finding specific referring pages within those domains is a little trickier - thus the post from the Analytics blog.
The following shot shows how to find specific referring pages within a specified domain. Here, I'm drilling down to see the specific page(s) at Sitepoint that sent traffic to our site:
That post solved only part of the problem. Google Analytics still does a poor job of showing the exact referring URL when it contains a dynamic string. vBulletin PHP pages are a good example. The following shot shows what happens when I click the Content selection in the menu above:
As you can see, Google Analytics doesn't report any dynamic arguments after the page name. This is a problem, because just seeing this page name does almost no good at all. Tens of thousands of Sitepoint pages begin with this filename. What I need is for the report to show this:
/forums/showthread.php?t=419917
instead of simply this:
/forums/showthread.php
A current thread at the Google Analytics Help group page is called Wishlist. I've posted here, requesting this feature. But there are many, many, many instances of similar requests that have gone unrequited. If you think this feature is important, I urge you to add your thoughts to the Wishlist thread.
All posts by Erik Dafforn
posted by Erik Dafforn at December 12, 2006 06:37 AM
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Comments
Thanks for this! I just stumbled across this post after searching google for:
"referring URLs" google analytics
It's exactly the information I need. Unfortunately, Google's inability to report any dynamic arguments makes their "referrer" report almost useless to me. :(
Posted by: Bonzo at January 26, 2007 04:29 PM