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We are losing data on referral visitors, and we cannot identify what's wrong. Within a certain period, there were 3000 clicks on a banner on our partner's site. (according to data from our partner)

Our analtytic shows only 300 referral visits from that banner. We can't understand, where are the rest of visits.

I read that some of these referral visits can show up as direct traffic. But we only had 1500 direct visitors within that same period. Therefore, some visitors are still not tracked! Maybe there's something wrong with our tracking code? It is up to date and it is placed within the head tag....

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  • are you using urchin parameters for tagging your landing pages? – Prasad Apr 5 '13 at 11:40
  • Thanks for reply! How can I verify if I do use these urchin parameters? – Anna Apr 5 '13 at 12:18
  • when you provided the landing page url to the partner, it should have been tagged with parameters such as utm_campaign, etc. Here's a tool that's available which you can use to tag the url - support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033867?hl=en – Prasad Apr 5 '13 at 13:03
  • I see, thanks! No, we didn't use the custom url builder back then, but we are currently setting this up. – Anna Apr 5 '13 at 13:05
  • By the way, will we see users with disabled cookies in the results of campaign we've created with utm tags? – Anna Apr 5 '13 at 13:06
up vote 0 down vote accepted

Google Analytics always has had some problems with referrals to track right. I can suggest you to use UTM to track your visitors from referral site's banner. Also you may try to write filter for Full Referrals Urls to track in your web-property preferences - > filters. For the instruction follow http://searchengineland.com/how-to-get-full-referral-content-urls-from-google-analytics-149549

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