Referrer

Both for the purposes of training our models and sharing analytics with customers, we track referrers for individual pageviews, sessions, and users.

If using our JavaScript beacon, referrer data collection is automatic.

Session referrer and user referrer

The session referrer is the referrer to the user's first activity in the given session.

The user referrer is the referrer to the user's first entry to the site.

For the Analytics Panel and RealTime Panel, we display data based on the session referrer.

Referrer type and name classification

We maintain a list of standard referrer names and types. When we examine the referrer URL, we compute referrerName and referrerType from the session referrer. The following are the current special values for referrerName:

referrerName	referrerType	sessionReferrer condition
Google	search	All Google pages. Note that traffic from non-search Google domains may be misclassified as search traffic.
Bing	search	All Bing pages
Yahoo	search	All Yahoo pages. Note that traffic from non-search Yahoo domains may be misclassified as search traffic.
goo	search	All goo.ne.jp domains. Relevant for websites that cater to a Japanese audience.
Yandex	search	All Yandex domains. Relevant for websites that cater to a Russian audience.
AOL	search	search.aol.com pages.
Ask	search	All ask.com pages.
WebCrawler	search	All webcrawler.com pages.
DuckDuckGo	search	All DuckDuckGo pages.
Facebook	social	All Facebook pages. To track app-driven traffic, see our In-app browsing documentation.
Twitter	social	All Twitter pages. To track app-driven traffic, see our In-app browsing documentation.
Pinterest	social	All Pinterest pages. This does not capture traffic driven through the Pinterest app, which is where the majority of Pinterest-driven traffic comes from. To track that, see our In-app browsing documentation.
Reddit	social	All Reddit pages.
LinkedIn	social	All LinkedIn pages.
StumbleUpon	social	All StumbleUpon pages.
Taboola	sponsored	Taboola's external recirculation unit.
Outbrain	sponsored	Outbrain's external recirculation unit.
ZergNet	sponsored	ZergNet's external recirculation unit.
MGID	sponsored	MGID's external recirculation unit.
RevContent	sponsored	RevContent's external recirculation unit.
AdBlade	sponsored	AdBlade's external recirculation unit.
RadiumOne	sponsored	All qklnk.co traffic.

In addition to the list above, we maintain a list of "media" referrers which includes standard newspapers and magazines. Any traffic from one of these gets marked with referrerType media and referrerName equal to the publication's name.

If you'd like a specific referrer to be tracked (for instance, a search engine, social network, external recirculation unit, or publication) please contact Support with your request. Any addition of referrers only applies to traffic from now onward and does not apply to historical traffic.

Direct and unknown referrerType and referrerName

There are two special values of referrerType (which also match the associated referrerName values):

• direct: This means that there was no referrer for the session start. This could happen if the user copy/pasted a link from somewhere, or directly typed it into the browser. Some HTTPS referrers may mask themselves and appear as direct traffic.
• unknown: This means that there was a referrer for the session start, but the referrer did not fit into the classification above.

Places where referrer drilldown can be used

• Analytics Panel: The referrer type can be used as a drilldown for the performance chart, so that you can get CTR and other metrics filtered to a specific referrer type. Referrer name is not available here. There is also a % of pageviews breakdown by referrer type on the top left.
• RealTime Panel: You can drill down by either referrerType or referrerName for the real-time chart as well as for the top clicked and top viewed data.
• Insights Panel: You can drill down by referrerName to filter to activity data based on a specific referrer name.

Sharing referrer data if using the activity API

For the activity API, you can include, in each activity, the following fields:

• referrer to denote the referrer that led to the current pageview from which activity is being sent.
• sessionReferrer to denote the referrer for the user's current session.
• userReferrer to denote the referrer for the user's first entry to the website or app.