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We have Urchin installed for the server statitics. Our server has an intranet subdomain (of course, banned to the outer access). When I look for the referal of any intranet page, I found that almost half of the access are from "direct[(none)]" and "google[organic]":

  1. "direct[(none)]" access includes bots, direct keyboard access, pdf/documents links... and all of these have the acces banned, and
  2. "google[organic]" access are done through the serach engine that can't acces to index the page nor redirect to that

So, I must conclude that the statistics of Urchin are not faithful. Can anybody confirm that terrible conclusion? Or can anybody explain and correct it?

CatalanProgrammer
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1 Answers1

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There are several ways to install Urchin. In this response I assume you use the tag method.

Urchin will create traffic sources based on document.referrer, it doesn't guess, it uses real data.

When you install Urchin one of the options you need to set is the domain name. This setting is used to store a first party cookie that will hold session information including referral info.

Let's say your intranet site is intranet.mycompany.com, this subdomain is private to your network but maybe the cookie setting in Urchin is set to mycompany.com, this will create a cookie in that domain and this cookie will apply to all subdomains.

Maybe this hostname has other subdomains, some that might be accessible outside your corporation and since they share the same cookie, they will share the same traffic source as well.

google/(organic)

Imagine this scenario:

  1. User Looks for Company in Google
  2. User arrives at the main public site at www.mycompany.com. Urchin registers this as a new visit from google/(organic).
  3. User opens the intranet website
  4. Urchin uses the same cookie and this is seen as a continuation of the visit that already has a traffic source
  5. Urchin just reuses the google/(organic) traffic source defined in the cookie.

Also Urchin can share cookies with Google Analytics, so if you are not using Urchin, but instead Google Analytics the scenario above is also possible.

direct(none)

Now about direct/(none). This is used everytime urchin can't determine a better traffic source. In other words when the javascript variable document.referrer is empty.

This can happen in a variety of moments, including but not limited to:

  • Clicks on a pdf document
  • Clicks in a Microsoft Office document
  • Directly typing the url in the browser navigation bar
  • Clicking in a bookmark
  • Going from an HTTPS to an HTTP webpage
Eduardo
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