Jeff Woelker : Chicago SEO, SEM, and Online Marketing Consultant

As many webmasters know, you often find “No Referral” data in your web traffic session mix. What is this “No Referral Data“? Where does it come from? Every visitor to your website has to have come from somewhere. They just can’t arrive out of thin air. Well, the short is answer is yes they can. The long answer is below.

1. Users arrive via a bookmark or by directly typing in your website. If you have a great brand name (Pepsi, Toyota, Amazon, etc.) you probably have a ton of this. Users arrive at your website because they know your company or know your brand and just assume that you own www.mybrand.com. Or you make it easy for users to “Bookmark this site” via javascript or del.icio.us. One way to track this could be by redirecting users to page that changes often www.mydomain.com redirects to www.mydomain.com/index/1234 or something. You could even have the /index/1234 hidden behind the scenes using some SEO trickery so as to maintain the user experience.
2. Your web server files are not formatted correctly. Needless to say, this is not good. There are a number of problems that this could have stemmed from, so I’ll leave it up to Google to explain.
3. Visitors are arriving by clicking on a link in an email you sent them. This is the case for most desktop email clients. Even web email clients should register that the user arrived via a web email client (Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, etc.). In order to check for this, you should set up an email redirect in order to catch this traffic. So when the user clicks on the link in your email they go to www.mydomain.com/email-redirect?www.mydomain.com/actualpage.htm or something along those lines. The redirect functionality shouldn’t be that difficult to set up, it’s just a matter of rolling it out into your email communications that may be a hassle. This will eliminate any most uncertainty in your traffic, as users could still type in your domain manually when they read it from your email.
4. UTM (Urchin Traffic Monitor) is not tracking properly. This is most likely the least of your worries. Again, I’ll defer to Google for the tech mumbo jumbo. But it essentially comes down to a lot of factors, over which you have little or no control unless you are an ISP yourself, in which case you better know what is going on.

Anything I might have missed? Let me know in the comments.