Google Analytics issue: My website is no longer showing up in my customers' list of referring websites

Marketing
1

Hi there, I run a website on which I list holiday accommodation. Some of my customers who also use Google Analytics have notified me to say my website no longer shows up in their list of referring websites. This seems to have happened since the end of December 2017.

When I look at my Analytics it is working fine and in my Event tracking I can see the number of clicks from my website to theirs is steadily growing, not dropping (or non-existent).

Does anyone have any idea what this could be caused by? Was there a change in Analytics around that time? Should I upgrade something? Or could it be something completely different?

Thanks for your suggestions,

Konrad

2

You’ll probably want to do some research, I looked up this and Google is changing a lot of things to AI.

This change has caused some hilarious, albeit adverse, affects. I read an article yesterday about how Google Translate is translating misspelled words into apocalyptic responses.

Considering I do not use analytics, I am not entirely sure what is going on, but did state that as of January, this year, Google is making the transition to AI.

Apocalyptic Translate:

Google Analytics article:

Google ai/ML:
https://medium.com/syncedreview/google-flexes-its-ai-muscles-at-i-o-2018-an-enhanced-google-assistant-tpu-3-0-e9751f4bfe79

Just to give some ideas.

3

Is your referring site’s domain HTTP, and do clients no longer showing referrals from you have HTTPS domains, and have those clients seen an increase in “direct/none” referrers? Or have clients changed from HTTP to HTTPS and your links still point to HTTP? Either of those conditions might have something to do with your not showing up as referrer.

5

If your website uses HTTPS protocol then Google won’t able to transfer your data as referral to the linked site unless linked website is also secure with HTTPS.

Therefore, you can see the outbound traffic to your customer site in the Google analytics. Your customer will experience huge loss in referral traffic from your site, but they will show increase same numbers in direct traffic.

Let’s see how Google performs with protocols in different behaviors to pass referral data.

  • https to http – No referral data sent
  • http to http – Referral data sent
  • http to https – Referral data sent
  • https to https – Referral data sent

To fix this issue, you need to add meta referral tag, it will allow to pass referral data over HTTPS secure site to HTTP non-secure site.

<meta name="referrer" content="always" />

6

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