Internal tracking

[scottalreadytaken]

I would be using this plugin if it could help me understand how people move around the website using the internal referrer. Unless I’m mistaken the plugin currently filters out the referrer field if it’s an internal link. Would anyone else be interested in being able to review internal referrers? Perhaps as a separate view?

[Zodiac1978]

Looks like a good idea. At least as an option. We need to discuss this further. @stklcode What do you think?

[stklcode]

Unless I’m mistaken the plugin currently filters out the referrer field if it’s an internal link.

That's right Referrers is only added if not prefixed with the current site's home URL:

statify/inc/class-statify-frontend.php

Lines 87 to 89 in f7985e3

	if ( ! empty( $referrer ) && self::strposa( $referrer, $needles ) === false ) {
	$data['referrer'] = esc_url_raw( $referrer, array( 'http', 'https' ) );
	}

)

Of course we can simply omit this constraint. Immediate result would be a messed up referrer list. Filtering the top lists for larger datasets is not very efficient.

We could add another DB column like referrer_int to simply separate both lists without performance issues. Probably parse to relative paths for automatic grouping on multi-domain sites.

The larger issue imho is the visualization. What comes to my mind is an "internal/external" switch above the existing referrer list. This however does not show the navigation paths - which are much more interesting than simply identifying local hubs. Using such UI switch to replace the current 2 tables with one large table and group not only by referrer but by path could fit the scope.

External view:

Top referers:    Top targets:
50 example.com   80 /
40 example.net   70 /foo/
30 example.org   60 /bar/

Internal view:

Top paths:
60 /     -> /foo/
50 /foo/ -> /bar/
40 /bar/ -> /baz/