Log Files & Analysis Tools

I think the referrer depends on the system the visitor is comming from. Some pass on the info and others don't.

Quote: Some seem to show it, others do on the servers own stats but not when I run the report with WT's and some don't want to play at all.

Most do pass the info on. Of course, logs on with that page as his home page, then it wouldn't show the referrer. Also if someone were to use something like Anonymizer. That wouldn't show it either. There are other tricks that a visitor could play also.

On some showing on the server stats and not others make sure that no filter is applied. Webtrends can filter in-house IP's and others so this could cause some discrepancies. Webtrends is a great program but it is pretty costly.

I use my hosts log files and also have some stored in a db that show things like which page they left from, how many people used your shopping cart etc.

My real query is this :

I have several clients sites that are all hosted with the same server, I have downloaded all the individual log files and run them through WT, all reports set up exactly the same way. Some of them are reporting the referrer information/keywords, some aren't. I have asked the host about this and they say that they are including the same info in all log files.

Can anyone offer an explaination or something else to try? All sites have referrals from search engines and if you look at the log files in notepad you can see the search strings on ALL of them!!

Webmistress, I really haven't been able to come up with a decent answer for you.

Have you tried running the same log file through several different times to see if you get the same result?

You could probably cut the log in pieces and run it through webtrends to see if anything changes or if you can find a pattern of referral errors. Compare the results of this chunk to the actual text that you run through a text editor. About the only thing that I found on Webtrends site was this article on referrals.

Yeah I have tried that and get the same results each time, the thing I don't get is that the host provides statistics using analog and that does show the referrer sting and when I run it through WTs it does't???