No more referrers

  • Resolved tnkaoua

    (@tnkaoua)


    7 years ago

    Hi

    I have used Slimstat Analytics for 1 year and a half, and I noticed for several weeks (or a bit more) than 99% or more of my visitors come from “nowhere”, no more referrer, they just arrived on a blog article, on a price list, or an about page.

    As I am currently running several promotion campaigns on different media (from Facebook to dedicated platforms about my activity), it is very important to know where the visitors come from, which promotion campaign is the more efficient by both visitors number and those who really purchases something to me.

    And the pages where “new” visitors arrive on my website are not advertised anywhere.

    CUrrently, Slimstat has become totally useless

    Did something change during the past months about this aspect on Slimstat? On my side, I do not have changed anything on the configuration, but I moved to “city” localisation.

    Regards
    Thierry

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • Thread Starter tnkaoua

    (@tnkaoua)

    After looking directly at the apache logs, I confirm there is a bug.

    The following REAL (except the IP) entry in my log file:

    X.X.X.X - - [31/Oct/2017:22:02:42 +0100] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 18603 "https://m.facebook.com/" "Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0.1; D5803 Build/23.5.A.1.291; wv) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Chrome/61.0.3163.98 Mobile Safari/537.36 [FB_IAB/FB4A;FBAV/145.0.0.37.86;]"

    does not appear in Slimtat, and this is the log entry with facebook referrer.

    Next accesses of the same IP do appear in Slimstat, but coming from / of my website.

    More over, on other IPs, a lot of pages appear in my logs but not on slimstat

    Can it be possible that I messed something in my setup???

    Sa?a

    (@stodorovic)

    Hi @tnkaoua,

    There are two possibilities which I see:

    1. Some browsers supports Referrer Policy. It deals with what information the browser sends to a server. Eg. you see only “https://m.facebook.com/” in apache log. I can’t say more details, but some websites block (or limit) sending of referrer.
    2. Apache server doesn’t properly pass headers to PHP (or something like this). It’s possible to java-script read referrer using document.referrer, but it could be feature request (it requires changes into wp-slimstat.js).

    For now, I’m just guessing, but I’ll try to check more details on my installations.

    Regards,
    Sasa

    Thread Starter tnkaoua

    (@tnkaoua)

    Hi

    I found that on Slimstats Access Log view, “Facebook app” appears on the left end side as an icon browser.

    I do not know if all “Facebook” accesses, from a standard browser or from the mobile app are gathered all together…

    Sa?a

    (@stodorovic)

    Hi @tnkaoua,

    I’ve checked Slimstats Access Log and everything works fine. Also, I can confirm that JS properly reads referrer. I didn’t see differences between apache and slimstats.

    As I’ve already written (regarding Referrers policy) browser will send only m.facebook.com or l.facebook.com. So, it’s similar as you have seen.

    I’ve noticed something strange on some installations. I had to click on refresh button on Visitor Activity bar (not browser refresh) to see all fields. Data are stored into database, but I can’t see them on WP dashboard without “refresh”. I’ll try to debug it in next days.

    Regards,
    Sasa

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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