Page URL equal to the Referring URL?

[jennyli]

Hello,

May I ask what is the possible reason that the page URL is the same as referring URL?

[Hyder_Ziaee]

There are two scenarios that come to mind:

1. If the user clicks on a link that refreshes the page, then the referrer would be the same as the page
2. The "Referring URL" in your image is not the out of the box dimension. To make sure this is not an issue with the implementation, you can breakdown further by "Referrer" to see if you get the same value. If the value is different, you can reach out to your developer to get the code corrected. (Note that the "Page URL" is also not the out of box dimension, so the issue could lie there as well)

[jennyli]

Thanks for your reply Hyder. 

I further breakdown by "Referrer" and it has the same count as "Referring URL". 

It is still mysterious Page URL is almost having the same count as Referring URL. If user refreshes the page, customer still come from another source and this should be captured. Grateful to know if there is any further advices to help our investigation. Thanks!

[Hyder_Ziaee]

so I did a bit of back tracing, and figured it out from your screenshot. 

When someone googles your site it shows the following link:

https://xxx/a/anti-epidemic-fund-third-wave

When you click this, it redirects to the following:

https://xxxx/en/article/anti-epidemic-fund-third-wave

The analytics tracking is being done on the 2nd page. Since the referrer for this page is not google but the 1st page, you are seeing that in the reports. 

[jennyli]

That's impressive Hyder thankyou so much!

What I need to do on the coding change so that the report "referring URL" or "referrer" can show www.google.com?

[Hyder_Ziaee]

The 2nd page would need to somehow override the document.referrer value with the referrer from 1st page. This would need to happen before the analytics call occurs.

[Melodytong123fgfd]

Hyder I use AA dashboard Jenny shown you to do reporting. I have a few questions:

1) If I want to see total traffic from google, what filters I should use on the Referring URL? Should I include "Google" and "/a/"?

2) Double check with you, all traffic carrying "/a/" in referring URL is coming from Google but not other search engine?

Thanks!

[Hyder_Ziaee]

Hi Melody,

Here are my answers:

1. If I want to see total traffic from google, what filters I should use on the Referring URL? Should I include "Google" and "/a/"?
   • Since you are not having tracking on the "/a/", you are not going to see any traffic from the search engine in referring URL
2. Double check with you, all traffic carrying "/a/" in referring URL is coming from Google but not other search engine?
   • I just tested for one link and that was from Bing. So, no, not only google, but looks like all search engines are impacted.

I would recommend updating your Internal URL filters as well. Ideally you should never have seen your own link being set in as a referrer. Having said that, the reports you are using are custom variables, having custom logic set in by the code. So ideally would ask you to review the following:

• Internal URL filters
• Logic Page URL and Referring URL
• SEO for organic search links, and paid search URLs (if they are all redirecting and losing referral data)