Get the Full URL for Referrals and Organic Sources in Google Analytics

Submitted by winter on Mon, 12/24/2007 - 02:54.

google

One of the great new features of Google Analytics is the ability to get the Referral Paths for a Referring Site. You can do this by going to 'Traffic Sources > Referring Sites' and then click on one of the sites listed. The first thing that you will notice if you do this is that it is just the Request URI from the Referring Site with no domain or query parameters. If the site is a dynamic site then there is no way to see exactly where the visit came from. I have come up with a solution for this problem.

Google Analytics stores the full referral path, and you can filter on it. The following filter will take the full path of the referring site and replace the shortened one that is visible in the reports.

    Filter Name: Full Referral Path
    Filter Type: Custom > Advanced
    Field A: Referral
    Extract A: (.*)

    Output To: User Defined
    Constructor: $A1

    Field A Required: Yes
    Override Output Field: Yes
    Case Sensitive: No

The above filter will replace what you see in your reports when you click on a Referring Site with the full path. For example if you have a referral from:

    http://www.trungso.com/2007/12/newcastle-united-vs-derby-county-2-2-goal-highlights-23-12-2007.html

you would see a referral from

    www.trungso.com

and when you clicked on it you would get

    /2007/12/newcastle-united-vs-derby-county-2-2-goal-highlights-23-12-2007.html

by default. If you apply this filter clicking on trungso.com in the Referring Sites report will give you

    http://www.trungso.com/2007/12/newcastle-united-vs-derby-county-2-2-goal-highlights-23-12-2007.html

You can now copy an paste the full URL into your browser and see exactly where the referral came from. This is especially powerful if the site has query parameters as Google Analytics does not display query parameters.