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I have a question regarding Google Analytics and unwanted referral stats generated by a bookmarklet.

I have a web service with GA installed. My users are using a bookmarklet to accomplish a certain task while visiting some other web page. Bookmarklet creates an iframe and opens up a page which is also on my domain and that page contains the same GA code.

For some reason GA sees those web sites (pages that bookmarklet was used on) as referral pages. That creates a problem for me since those pages are not real referrals (no actual links to my site). I have no desire to track pages my users marked with the bookmarklet.

It’s important to mention that bookmarklet page must be a part of the same domain as my main page. I can not move it on other domain or subdomain.

This is what I tried so far:

I’ve created a new GA account (subdomain.mydomain.com) and used it only on my bookmarklet page hoping that all stats related with the bookmarklet will appear on that account. This worked only partially. Stats for the bookmarklet started to appear on the new account but my original GA account continued to track referral pages.

We tried to use a pop up window to load a web page instead of the iframe. No difference.

Any help on how to get rid of unwanted referral sites would be appreciated.

Leon
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2 Answers2

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See _setReferrerOveride:

_setReferrerOverride()

_setReferrerOverride(newReferrerUrl) Sets the referrer URL used to determine campaign tracking values. Use this method to allow gadgets within an iFrame to track referrals correctly. By default, campaign tracking uses the document.referrer property to determine the referrer URL, which is passed in the utmr parameter of the GIF request. However, you can over-ride this parameter with your own value. For example, if you set the new referrer to http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=hats, the campaign cookie stores a new campaign with source=google, medium=organic, and keyword=hats.

_gaq.push(['_setReferrerOverride', 'URL-YOU-WANT-AS-REFERRER']);

Or, you could try

_addIgnoredRef():

_addIgnoredRef()

_addIgnoredRef(newIgnoredReferrer) Excludes a source as a referring site. Use this option when you want to set certain referring links as direct traffic, rather than as referring sites. For example, your company might own another domain that you want to track as direct traffic so that it does not show up on the "Referring Sites" reports. Requests from excluded referrals are still counted in your overall page view count. Async Snippet (recommended)

_gaq.push(['_addIgnoredRef', 'www.sister-site.com']);

You would have to grab the referrer and populate it dynamically. Probably with parent.document.referrer Of course this might make any referrals (non-bookmarklet) from these sites not record in the future. And, at some point you would need to clear them.

jk.
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0

The most simple solution, if you don't need to track the hits from the bookmarklet at all, is to simply not include the GA code in the web page when it is opened by the bookmarklet.

Your bookmarklet can open the page like http://yoursite.com/?mode=bookmarklet

And in your server side code you can use something like

if ( mode != "bookmarklet" ) {
    outputGaCode()
}
DG.
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  • Thanks DG. Excluding the code would be the easiest solution. However, I still need to track page loads for my bookmarklet page. – Leon Mar 18 '12 at 10:40