High % of Visits do not have a value for referrer type

[gpTRP]

We are seeing across our various report suites a large delta between total visits and the number of visits that have a referrer type associated with them. Based on the Adobe definition of this dimension I would assume every visit would have a referrer type as the "Typed/Bookmarked" type is intended as a catch all for any visit where adobe does not have any referrer information for it. The deltas we are seeing range from 20% of visits all the way up to 50% of all visits depending on the report suite we are looking at.

Is this common? Is there a particular reason a visit may not have any value here?

[Jennifer_Dungan]

Are you by any chance tracking Mobile App data as well? Mobile Apps do not set Referral Data (not typed/bookmarked, not anything), there is literally no "referral instance" triggered.

[Hyder_Ziaee]

Check you "Internal URL Filters". It should only contain the domains that are internal to your site (with some exceptions such as payment gateways or partner pages).

"Typed//Bookmarked" is not a catch all. It is a label to show when s.referrer value was blank

[cmabie]

I've seen similar replies on other questions but this doesn't necessarily explain why the value is missing. Assuming a visit did come from an internal site, shouldn't it be adopting the referrer from that previous site visit, assuming it is being tracked within the same report suite? 

To explain with an example, say two sites were owned by the same company and being tracked in the same report suite. The first is definition.com and the second is thesaurus.com. A user searches google for a word's definition and ends up on defitinion.com. Then while on the site they want to find words with the same meaning, so they click some link that takes them to thesaurus.com.

I would expect this to come through as one single visit, where the referrer type is search engine and referrer is google. Based on your definition you are saying that this would actually be two visits? One with referrer google and one with an internal referrer?

[Jennifer_Dungan · Accepted solution]

If definition.com and thesaurus.com are tracked into the same tracking suite, and are set up as internal urls, then yes, the referrer from definition.com would carry through to thesaurus.com....

But if they are in separate suites, but marked as "internal URLs" of one another (it could happen... not sure why someone would do that, but in theory maybe they only want to see non-company related referrers), then those two sites being in separate suites would not carry over the referrer, and the settings to ignore definition.com as a referrer would not result in no "referrer" being set... no Referrer Instance, no Referrer value (and by extension Referring Domain and Referrer Type, etc). And Typed/Bookmarked also wouldn't trigger because the referrer isn't empty.

@Hyder_Ziaee advice is good, things change, it's not a bad idea to make sure that the Internal URLs are set correctly...

I've seen people with internal URL set to "." which would result in every single domain in existence to be treated like an internal URL and not trigger a referrer instance...

The other possibility is that you there is .domain.com coded in, which is good.... unless there is a subdomain that has no tracking on it that is sending large amounts of traffic to the site which would then not be picked up...

For instance:

missingtracking.domain.com gets lots of traffic, then sends people to www.domain.com

With no tracking on missingtracking.domain.com to capture the visit, pages views, referrers, etc non of that will be in Adobe to use one the user is sent to the main site... and since the main site has .domain.com set as an internal referrer, the traffic coming from missingtracking.domain.com won't trigger a referrer on the main site....

[Benjienen]

Hi gpTRP,

A workaround that I do for these instances is through the external tracking codes, then I custom a segment, and consolidate external tracking codes together especially if there are channels aside from usual sources that you are expecting.