Referrer Dimension in Workspace vs. Data Feeds

[thebalver]

Hi all - I am currently looking at several AA reports based around the Referrer dimension in both AA Workspace and through Data Feeds.

When looking at amounts of visits or certain events, the numbers broken down by Referrer vary massively between Workspace and the Data Feed columns.

Example:

looking at an event that happened within a certain Hit in the Data Feed will have the post_referrer or referrer column as NULL and the ref_type = 6, so by definition a Typed/Bookmarked Referrer. In Workspace however this Event would be allocated a different Referrer, for example google.com.

We are observing many of those scenarios, where the sum of any Events broken down by Referrer, does not match up between Workspace and the Data Feed.

I verified that we are using the standard implementation of this dimension and are not applying any custom rules to it. 

Is there an explanation to this? And a way to align both the Workspace Interface & Data Feed data?

Thanks,

Niklas

[BenjaminHawk]

Hi Niklas, when you say Data Feed, do you have a specific data feed you are referring to? Or are you referring to data warehouse?

Can you also give an example of the reporting you are consuming?
For instance in the data from this report, various metrics will give various results.
Occurences: Doesn't report how many times it was set, just how many times it was seen across time.
Referrer Instances: Only counts when it was set
Visits: will show how many times in a visit it happened(grand total is however deduped at top)
Orders: Will show which referrers led to an order / purchase

So to better answer your question can you provide just a little more detail? 

[Jennifer_Dungan · Accepted solution]

Totally agree with this... the context is hugely important to being able to help. Another thing that may have been missed is that in the Raw Data feeds, you also need to ensure that you look at the Exclude Hit flag, and make sure that this data is also excluded from your data processing rules... these Exclude Hit values indicate the date that should be excluded based on your bot traffic and internal IP filter rules, so if not excluded can result in huge differences.

As for "post_referrer" / "referrer"... in general referrer will be set along with the referrer instance, post_referrer will be set on every page according to your attribution settings. I believer referrer is by default set to visit level attribution... so if I come to your site from Google, the first hit will have "referrer", "post_referrer" and the referrer instance metric set... the next page I hit in that visit will still have post_referrer set (but not the other two - if I recall correctly... definitely not the referrer instance in any case). 

[thebalver]

Hi Benjamin,

the reporting I look at in Workspace is very similar to the one in your screenshot. So basically just looking at Metrics broken down by the Referrer. Here is an example:

In general it does not matter what Metric i am looking at or how it behaves, my question is more about the Referrer Dimension in general.

Regarding the Data Feed: We have a data feed set up with all relevant columns on a hit level from the same report suite. Bot Traffic is of course excluded in both the Data Feed and Workspace data, so that can not be the reason for this discrepancy.

When looking at the aggregation of those Metrics (Visits, Custom Event 14 etc.) in the Data Feed and group it by the referrer or post_referrer or ref_type (or pretty much any column that is based around the Referrer Dimension) columns the numbers are vastly different to what i see in the Screenshot above for example. So I am just kind of looking for a way to get the same numbers from our Data Feed as i see in the Workspace Report if that makes sense

I hope this helps and gives a bit more context.