Referring Domain Confusion

[ebeckerman]

How exactly does referring domain work? If a third-party website doesn't have a link to the site I'm tracking, how would there be a lot of traffic capturing the 3rd party site as the referring domain?

Example with random fictional data:

Let's say we're looking at one month of data for my website, 'examplesite.com'.

Freeform table view:

Marketing Channel: Referring Domain | 10,000 visits

Marketing Channel Detail: thirdpartysite.com | 5,000 visits

How is 'thirdpartysite.com' contributing significant data if there are no links to my site, 'examplesite.com'?

[bjoern__koth]

Hi @ebeckerman 

The referring domain can obviously only be set from Adobe Analytics if the information is present in the s.referrer property.

So, there must either be direct links from that domain OR redirects through that domain bringing traffic to your website.

which third party domain are we talking about? 

https://experienceleague.adobe.com/en/docs/analytics/implementation/vars/page-vars/referrer#

[Krishna_Musku]

@ebeckerman That thirdpartsite.com has link/links directing to your site, for which the thirdpartysite.com has showed in the marketing channel detail for referring domain.

[Krishna_Musku]

If you don't have links directing to your site from thirdpartysite, then there might be some redirects happening.

[ebeckerman]

This is super helpful, thank you! One follow-up Q - if we have no connection to the thirdpartysite, is there any way for us to figure out where a link might live?

We did try to replicate the traffic by going to the thirdpartysite and looking for a way to get back to our site, but we were  unsuccessful. 

[Krishna_Musku]

@ebeckerman just making sure, Is your selected time period for the table is after the removal of the links referring to your site? If yes, start looking trend of  of the data to check if it is trending down or not, and if the traffic is very minimal, it might be cache issue as well.

[ebeckerman]

not quite - we have no idea what this thirdpartysite is really & are trying to determine how they're getting to our site from there. we have no knowledge of any link from them to us

[Jennifer_Dungan]

You can try looking at the full Referrer, but a lot of sites have started hiding the path, so only the domain (i.e. the home page url) is passed through the headers....

You could try doing an advanced Google search:

site:thirdpartsite.com examplesite.com

---

Basically the "site:" designation will restrict the results to only thirdpartysite.com (make sure there is no space after the colon, it should be as a single block of text "site:domain.com" 

You might have luck, you might not... we've had issues like this before too, and sometimes we can find the links, and other times we can't....

[ebeckerman]

I will try this - thank you!

[Jennifer_Dungan]

Good Luck!