Yeah i guess the problem isn’t specifically a Google Analytics one. Just where I noticed it. I don’t know that there will be a fix, since we probably can’t control everyone’s browser. Guess it’s one of those things we’ll have to live with.

If you do ever figure out a solution, even a partial one, do let me know.

Referrer information is collected and sent from your browser so any and all tracking software will give you the same problem. Each browser has a different way of caching header information and I have not found a solution for resetting this data on a client’s computer and I believe for safety reasons all browsers will not allow websites to alter this data on the client side.

I know this doesn’t really help fix this problem, but at least we can understand why it is happening.

Sean

The one thing you have to watch is if your cable or dsl modem needs to be restarted it’ll sometimes assign you a new IP address, which means you’ll have to update the filter with your new IP.

There could be a lot of reasons why the other site generates more clicks, one of which could be they’re clicking the ad themselves. You could study how they’ve incorporated the ad into their design and try to understand how they’re getting more clicks.

However remember that clicks aren’t everything to the advertiser. Ultimately they’re looking to make a sale and if you send one visitor each month that leads to a sale and your competitor sends 1,000 visitors who never buy, the ad is still better placed on your site than your competitor.

Instead of tracking visits referred from one site or another, I think your client should track both ad campaigns with the proper campaign tags (utm_campaign, see Analytics’ help for campaign tracking). Then he could tell exactly how many visitors he had from one campaign or another.

Furthermore, I don’t think that what matters is getting clickers to land on the website and then be “gone in 32 seconds”, or at least this should not be the way the customer measures the output/ROI of the two campaigns. Yes, time on page could be one thing. Goals and conversions should be another. It really doesn’t matter if one campaign is generating 1000 visitors and 1 conversion, if the other generates 2 out of 5. Does it?

Not to mention the fact that measuring conversions (sales, subscriptions, download of some material, whatever) instead of landings can filter out happy clickers who just reach the website and do nothing useful.

Good luck,
Calin / Romania

Our closest competitor, which is the daily newspaper on line, has only 10% the traffic our site has. An identical display as was put on both sites, and the GA report claims that the other site generated 444 referrals with a bounce rate of 75.90%, and avg time spent as ONLY 32 seconds.
In contrast, the report claims our site generated only 21 referrals with a bounce rate of 42.86%, and avg time spent as 3 minutes & 22 seconds.

These stats seem completely illogical to me. I am inclined to believe that the daily newspaper may be quickly clicking on & off their advertisers ads, just to inflate the numbers….and in turn, mislead the advertisers as to the value/performance of their ads.

Am I grasping at straws here? Could there be any other explanation that makes any sense?

It’s more that the majority of people visiting the site aren’t going to be doing any workaround and why should they.

I agree with you about not trusting referrer stats. That was really why I posted this. I knew they weren’t perfect, but I had thought referrer stats more accurate than they apparently are. I no longer trust them the same as I once did.

What Guy said is what I think is happening. I did notice not long after this post that when I cleared the browser cache I stopped seeing the same referrer numbers. It makes sense.

Of course how many people go around clearing their cache between visits?

it would still be interesting if you could try out what Guy suggested.

If that approach works then this is a bug in the browser.

Of course, you should never trust referrer anyway (because of its nature), but it is interesting to see how it works.

Enjoy!