Hi everyone,
In the past, Matomo has been able to tell us the exact url of traffic coming from a forum thread. For example “website.com/thread-URL”. For the past few months to a year, it’s been truncating the source URL to just “website.com” and not giving the additional information on the complete URL. Would you know why this is happening?
Hi,
Matomo stores the Referrer value as stored by the browser. You can enter document.referrer in the Javascript console to see what it is at the moment.
The reason you often only are seeing the domain is a feature called Referrer-Policy.
This allows website owners to send a header (or HTML tag) on their website that tells Browsers how to set the Referrer once the visitor leaves the website.
By default it is no-referrer-when-downgrade which means when going to a HTTPS site the full referrer is sent and no referrer is sent when going to a HTTP site.
But a lot of websites are setting it to strict-origin-when-cross-origin which means that only links to the same origin (so domain+protocol) get the full referrer why others only get the domain.
Independent on that keep in mind that Matomo collapses Referrers by domain in the UI and you can click on them to see the full URL.