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I've set up an trigger in GTM that tracks a 404 event. This shows the 404 page as the event action and the page the 404 was found on as the page label.

This works perfectly excluding the fact that any 404's found within my own website don't show the referrer in the label.

Presumably this is an issue with analytics rather than tag manager but why do my own pages not show as a referrer and how can I get it to do so?

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  • Can you include a screen shot of how this is set up in GTM? Or at least describe all the steps we would need to do to reproduce your set up?
    – Stephen Ostermiller ♦
    Sep 22, 2017 at 8:24
  • GTM Image now attached, the trigger fires when the page title matches 'Page not found' which is how it's displayed on my 404. Again no problems with it firing I just cant see any referrals from internal links in GA
    – Matthew Jasek
    Sep 22, 2017 at 8:29
  • Have you checked the GA real time reporting when clicking to a 404 or your own site to see what the label is set to in that case?
    – Stephen Ostermiller ♦
    Sep 22, 2017 at 8:33
  • The GTM documentation seems to indicate that {{referrer}} should be the previous page in all cases and should work within your own site: support.google.com/tagmanager/answer/6106899?hl=en#web_example
    – Stephen Ostermiller ♦
    Sep 22, 2017 at 8:35
  • Real time shows 'not set' if I come from an internal link and the referring url if coming from on external link. I have the same results using the GTM preview mode.
    – Matthew Jasek
    Sep 22, 2017 at 8:39

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I'm pleased to report a solution has been found. Although my site uses SSL the link on the page included http which then gets rewrote to https and excludes the Referrer data.

To solve the problem I used the following meta tag on my pages:

<meta name="referrer" content="strict-origin">

You can read more about the referrer meta tag here https://blog.wsol.com/seo-for-https-sites-should-you-implement-the-meta-referrer-tag

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