referring domain numbers in marketing channel trends very high than normal.

[aagk123]

referring domain numbers in marketing channel trends very high than normal. How to debug and find issue? FYI no changes made to marketing channel rules.

[Jennifer_Dungan]

Did other marketing channels (by raw numbers) decline significantly at the same time?

Have you tried to correlate the Marketing Channel (using Marketing Channel Instance to limit the data to when its being set) against the Referring Domain?

Also, while your Marketing Channel rules haven't changed, is it possible someone pushed a tracking update and broke referral tracking.. your "Typed/Bookmarked" also seemed to spike... I wonder if someone broke tracking Referrals in your implementation (as in, as the user navigates from page to page within your site, the previous page isn't being set as a referrer and now every page is treated like an incoming source of traffic when it shouldn't be).

[aagk123]

The same day I excluded launch code from one specific page to exclude that page from reporting. Could that be the reason? I excluded using the abort function

{s.abort=true;} 

[Jennifer_Dungan]

That shouldn't affect anything... that page, even if excluded from tracking, should still be populating the referrers in the HTML Header, and the code on the next page should still be reading that value...

Were any other changes made on that day?

[aagk123]

so new redirections were made to pages

[aagk123]

Alos when broken down bt marketing channel detail I see noreferrer value increased so much.

[aagk123]

The direct channel numbers reduced.

[Jennifer_Dungan]

Ok, well if a bunch of pages were redirected, those are more than likely losing their referral data...

Referrers should be forwarded if possible... but most developers / devops when putting these in place don't think about the detrimental impact to analytics....  They just care about the functionality.

• So user comes to Page A with Referrer 1
• Redirect rules trigger
• User lands on Page B (referrers are lost)

Your report will treat these as "Typed/Bookmarked"

[aagk123]

just trying to understand if we fix this will the referring domain numbers will be back to normal? As I told you now its inflated like anything.

[Jennifer_Dungan]

The fix is to get those redirects to forward the referrers... that should get your Marketing Channel distribution back to normal...

But that's assuming that this can be done in your tech stack.... 

[aagk123]

so when the referrers are forwarded the processing rule will match it with the internal URL filter and ignore those hits since its an internal URL and thus numbers will be reduced or back to normal. Is my understanding right?

I think ideally referring domain in marketing channel takes value from the document.referrer so it must be the previous page url when within the site?

[aagk123]

What is the correct implementation? When I come to the home page from Google and in the console "document.referrer" its shows "google.com" and when I go to page B in the console it shows our website address/domain URL. Is this correct?

[Jennifer_Dungan]

The document.referrer should be used by Adobe to populate the s.referrer param.

Now, when you are looking at straight refers, any internal referrer should be ignored (assuming you have correctly configured your internal url filters).

However, in Marketing Channels, you can actually have an "internal" channel. This however should be limited to "first page of visit" (so that Pages B, C, D, etc of your visit do not supersede the Marketing Channel that brought the user to your site.

I think you are also confused about what "forwarding a referrer" means

so when the referrers are forwarded the processing rule will match it with the internal URL filter and ignore those hits since its an internal URL and thus numbers will be reduced or back to normal. Is my understanding right?

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No.. forwarding the referrer means the following:

• User on Google
• Opens Page A (referrer is "google.com")
• Page A redirects to Page B
  
  • Without "forwarded referrers" Page B might see Page A OR nothing as the referrer...
  • With "forwarded referrers", "google.com" is passed forward to Page B, so that despite the user coming to Page A then being sent to Page B, the referrer that Page A should have seen will now be seen by Page B (allowing you to see the proper referrer and therefore get the correct Marketing Channel). Hence, document.referrer "google.com" is forwarded to the real page which is tracking the user's first page of the visit. It will not be seen as internal, or no referrer, that's the point... it will maintain the correct referrer.

Now, going back and thinking about something you said earlier:

The same day I excluded launch code from one specific page to exclude that page from reporting.

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If that page is the first page of the visit for many users, then you won't be tracking any of those referrals... So it might have had an impact.

Without seeing your site, the flows, all your Marketing Channel rules, etc, it can be hard to understand the full picture and what impacts have occurred.