: Google Analytics - Referring Sites by Goal, is it accurate? Preface: I'm taking a look at the Google Analytics we have for our product's website and we have a bunch of goals setup for each

@Lee4591628

If your main referring sites are internal pages, it means your Google Analytics is mis-implemented, and is leading to self-referrals.

In other words, people are coming to your site from external pages, then at some point, likely due to a subdomain change without proper code to handle the change, they're being treated as a new visit, with a referral from an internal page. Then when they complete your goal, that session has a source that is your internal page.


Hypothetical Example:

Google Search
"Jon Lim's widgets" That leads me to
jonlimswidgets.com/buy-now. On this
page, I'm a visitor referred by Google
Search.

I click a 'Buy Now' button,
which takes me to
secure.jonlimswidgets.com. But, if I
didn't setup subdomain tracking in my
tracking code, I've initiated a new
visit, referred by jonlimswidgets.com.

Then I buy your widget, trigger your
goal, and the Referring Site for
completing that goal is
jonlimswidgets.com


There are other things that could cause self-referrals, but this is the most common cause.

To prevent this from happening, you should read up on Cross-Domain Tracking in Google Analytics.

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