If you use Google Analytics to track your websites stats, you have probably realized that Google doesn’t let you see the full URL of the sites referring traffic to you. That’s a basic feature that somehow is not included in GA but fortunately for us, there is a simple trick you can implement to display the full URL of the referring site.
Before I explain you this trick, let me give full credit to Ruben Yau for actually coming up with it. I also want to thank Ruben for replying to my comment/question on his blog so quickly.
As stated above, Google Analytics doesn’t let you see from what specific page your visitors are coming.
For example, instead of showing this as the traffic referrer:
http://digg.com/apple/How_to_install_ipa_files_on_iPhone_and_iPod_Touch,
it will just show you this: Digg.com
That’s not very useful information…
The solution to view the full URL of the referring site is to implement a simple hack that uses filters to place the referrer into the User Defined Report.
Instructions:
Go to your Google Analytics account and click on Filter Manager > Add Filter, and enter the following information:
Filter Name: Full Referrer (or whatever you want to call it)
Filter Type: Custom Filter
Advanced
Field A -> Extract A: Referral (.*)
Field B -> Extract B: leave blank
Output To -> Constructor: User Defined $A1
Field A Required: Yes
Field B Required: No
Override Output Field: Yes
Case Sensitive: No
It should look like this:
Now, if you look at your Traffic Sources, you usually see this:
Too see your User Defined Report containing the full information about the referring sites, click on “Visitors” in the nav bar and choose “User Defined”. You should get something like this:
That’s it! Pretty easy, yet very useful.
On his site, Ruben also explains another option involving tweaking the Google Analytics code, but that seemed a little too complex for me, especially given that this method works perfectly.
Now I’d like to see GA implement this without having us use workarounds. That’s a basic feature that should be included in GA by default. Oh well, with Google, it’s take it or leave it, isn’t it?
Twitter Updates
Thanks for this tip. I’ve always been frustrated by the lack of full URLs. It’s working perfectly.
Extremely useful trick. Thankyou Sebastian, this will surely help many bloggers using Analytics!
Sebastien – this is a great tip – thank you so much. It’s a real help to me when analysing our web traffic.
Thanks for sharing
Cant find the FILTER MANAGER option. Help please.
@Lex – go to the summary page of all (if several) the websites you’re tracking with Google Analytics. Scroll down to the bottom and look at the right, you will see the “filter manager”
Thanks You very Much, Thanks you
Quick question: All I get is a huge number of (Not Set) What am I doing wrong?
Hello – great post, but I am also getting the (not set) in my reports, in fact it is all I get. Would be great to get some ideas on why this is. Thanks!
I’m also just getting a very large “not set” value on both the Visitors and Referred Sites reports. What are we doing wrong?
The messed up part is that my pages go from 1 of 900 to 1 of 29 as it groups a large part of my referrers as NOT SET.
If anyone can explain how to work around this I would greatly appreciate it.
I think I realized something guys. Someone try this out and let me know if you think its a possibility.
NOT SET is for days before you created the filter.
So I set this yesterday.. anything before yesterday say NOT SET
Yesterday and today show up.
this is good
Cheers for this Sebastien (and Ruben Yau) !
Its still surprising full referring URLs are not available within GA. This article is a must for analytics data analysers.
Cheers,
D