What exactly does "referrer" refer to?

On the dashboard, what exactly does the bar graph "referrer" mean or stand for? Is it how many people come in being referred by a direct link? Is it old referred people? Simply does it mean new people coming in by a referral link?

People who hit the site based on a referred link with your ID in it.

Exactly, people who has referrer or ref set on the url. Both work interchangeably because I cannot spell referrer without pasting it from the source code.

Arguably it would have been better to add to the referrer graph if the referral cookie in the browser was equal to the artist page currently bein viewed.

Right now:
Someone clicks on a clip on Vader's Widget and goes to the site with ref=someone and the cookie is set.
Someone likes what he sees and goes to Vader's artist page.

Right now, this would not give a hit on the referrer bar, just the other one.

Which behavior is correct is a matter of taste, I suppose.

Best regards,
Marcus

I would think a listing for people who click a widget come to the site, sign up would be recorded as a referral. Waiting for a first sale could be a long time, it would be nice to know our widget marketing is working.

Yes, that is what I am trying to get a measurement on. What would be really cool is if we could get a log output from the webserver as to what the referrer log shows. This way we can see what is working and what doesn't as far as marketing and advertising goes. Is that a possibility Marcus? I know it is not easy and the log files get gigantic, but if you use something like analog, it might just work. Just some thoughts as this would really help in determining where we can spend out most effective methods of marketing.

You already have a log of all people who have been invited by you https://www.pond5.com/it/index.php?page=invite_hist. It will reappear somewhere shortly. Probably on my_financials.

Best regards,
Marcus

Thats great, just what I was looking for, thanks

Yes, I understand that.. but that is now what I mean.... I mean if we can get the actual referrer from the webserver to see the originating page of the incoming hit, that would help in determining where the marketing is most effective. For example I have several links back to P5 from several different places on the net. It would be beneficial to see which ones perform the best and which ones don't do anything.In simple terms, we could see where the most traffic comes from. Of course there is another way to do this as well... for example we could mark the referrer URL with a tag that ID's this for us.. for example:

www.pond5.com/vadervideo?ref=vadervideo&location=site1

or somethign like that. Then in some fashion we track site1="youtube-promovid-1" through some backend mechanism..

This way each artist can set up their ref id's and track them to see which ones work and which ones don't . Make sense? :)

Andy

Aha, yes, this should not be a problem I suppose. If it should be heavy for the DB we could always chunk them in the memory cache or something.

I think there is some stats unique to all instances of the Widget as well, but I'm not sure their (Clearspring) API allows us to dig it out for you without giving away our Clearspring login.

We'll talk this over and present a suggestion.

Thanks for the idea!

Best regards,
Marcus