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I'm looking at Top Refering Sites and I see my site as one of the top referers. I understand every time someone navigates my site, my own site is considered a referrer. But I am confused because in the SmartStats Glossary says:

"referral - As used in "top referring URL" or "Top Referring Site"; the site name, IP address and/or URL of the place a visitor was prior to visiting your website."

How can the user be on my site prior to visiting my site?

Also if someone bookmarks my site, will that show up as "No Referrer?"

Thanks for your help.

First, it looks like the glossary has a wrong definition. A site is counted as a referrer for every hit, so if they come from yahoo.com, for example, then tromp around to 10 pages on your site, you'll get 1 referrer from yahoo.com and 9 from your own site.

A really useful report is in the interactive reports section. It's called Top Initial Referrers by Page. This one is VERY useful to see where people are coming from on the web.

With regards to your second question, bookmarks count as No Referrers.

Thanks Grady.

If I look at one screen in Initial Referers, why does the total not equal visitors to that screen in the Top Page Views/Visits for the same time period? By not equal I mean these numbers are way off.

Also what is Direct Referers? The Help documentation is mystifying.

Thanks again

Would a user typing a URL directly into the address bar count as a No Referrer also? If so, how can I capture the number of visitors doing that? My small business participated in a large expo last weekend and handed out 1,200 magnets with our web address on them. I'd like to try and track the effectiveness over the next few months.

No referrer means they didn't come from somebody else, so they either used a bookmark, a shortcut, or typed it in directly. It's not possible to track which of the three it was.

we get a lot of "no referrers" when people send a link to a page in our site to someone else in an email. when someone clicks on the link in the email, it is "no referrer"