I'm just emailing about a potential tracking issue with referral urls I discovered recently. I was trying to figure out if there is a way to tell when a user has navigated to a page by swiping back on their smartphone browser. I thought that in these cases, perhaps the referral_url_raw would be the page they were one before (i.e. the page they were viewing when they swiped back).
To test this, I figured out what my own browser id was for my phone and then tested clicking through a chain of articles starting from the front, and then pressing back to go back through and eventually reach the front again. Looking at my activity in pageview, when you press back to return to a page, it reloads the referrer_url_raw from the original pageview a second time, rather that the page they were on when they pressed back, which doesn't feel accurate to me.
Quite hard to describe in text, so here's some sample data showing what I mean - they 'referrer_url_raw's highlighted red are the ones that I think don't look right. I'm not sure if this is replicated on desktop but I can quite easily repeat the same process and see if needed.
Further to this, I've done some more checks on my own browser IDs and it appears that the issue also occurs with external referrals - for example, if you access a page view Google, and then click on from that page and keep returning back to it via pressing the back button, it will list it as a Google referral each time you return to the page. As referrer_significant_site seems to be affected as well as referrer_url_raw, this means that we are inflating the number of page views from external referrers, although it's unclear by how much.
rhiannareechaye
commented
10 months ago
email by Samuel Parker (7/7):