Yahoo Search Referrals not appearing in Referrer reports

[aliskink]

We have an ancient VISTA rule which populates our Tracking Code report.  It records plenty of referrals from Yahoo which appear as 'search.yahoo.com' in the Tracking Code report.  However these do NOT appear in the Referring Domains report or other referrer reports.  

For example, in August the Tracking Code report showed 4,000 click-throughs from search.yahoo.com, but the Referrers report only recorded 611 of those.  The remaining 3,400 click-throughs weren't shown AT ALL in the referrers report, which implies they were seen as Internal Referrals.   This is supported by our Marketing Channels report which showed over 2,000 visits in the Internal Referrals report which the Tracking Code report said came from 'search.yahoo.com'.

Has anyone else noticed this behaviour?  Is our VISTA rule somehow hiding the true referrer?  Maybe there's some kind of instant redirect or reload which the VISTA rule somehow ignores, but which stops the standard Referrer reports from seeing the initial yahoo.com referrer?

If you don't have the VISTA rule then possibly the only other way you'd know if you had the same issue would be by comparing reports from Yahoo with reports from Adobe.

[devinderbanga]

Hi 

Sitecatalyst request require minimum 500ms to successfully send data to server , if this image or request breaks in between than this will result in incomplete data or possibly no data.

I request you to test the image or check, if there is no error (js or URL BINDING issue) which restrict to record data.

Regards

Devinder

[aliskink]

Thanks Devinder.  I think you're on the right track, in that there MUST be some kind of page reload happening before the full tracking runs.  However all other tracking works perfectly, it is only referrals from search.yahoo.com that are affected in this way.  

I've tested by clicking through from Yahoo search and there's no redirect/reload - but of course in my tests the referrer *is* recorded successfully.  We get plenty of properly-recorded referrals from Yahoo, which VISTA rewrites as 'Yahoo - Organic' and the Referrals reports and Search Engine reports record correctly as coming from Yahoo.  So this problem only affects some of the Yahoo referrals (but quite a sizable portion).  I've not been able to replicate the exact behaviour which is presumably triggering some sort of instant reload.

What confuses me is that the VISTA rule isn't affected and recognises the referrer (it doesn't re-write it as 'Yahoo - Organic' but records it as 'search.yahoo.com' as if that is an unknown referrer).  Yet the standard tracking sees it as an internal referral.  My understanding was that VISTA rules work by amending the data collected in the Adobe data-collection servers, and that data is collected *from* the standard tracking.  So I don't understand how VISTA knows the referrer but the standard tracking doesn't.

[Gigazelle · Accepted solution]

Hi Alison,

From what it sounds like, there's an internal referrer that's stealing credit from purchases. I'd recommend creating a segment where campaign is search.yahoo.com and referring domain is not yahoo.com. From there, start pulling reports and see if you can find a common thread among those visitors.