We have been having some issues tracking referers on our Piwik installation. For some reason, all of our referers have been “Direct Entry” even though I have been clicking on links to our site from a number of different sites.
I did some searching around online and on the site but I wasn’t able to find anything. I may have been using the wrong search terms so any guidance would be much appreciated.
To better isolate your testing, use a different PC or browser than the one used to view your Piwik dashboard, clear your browser cache (cookies) between visits, and turn off heuristics (see global.ini.php).
give us an example google query that leads to your website and your website URL we can see if the piwik JS code is found in the first page showing after clicking on the search result.
gonna dig up this old thread, as I have the same problem as wavesound since I upgraded from 0.4.2 (or was it 0.4.3 - don’t know) to 0.4.5 in the end of november. Directly after the update I got no recorded referers anymore. Updated to 0.5.1 today and the issue is still not resolved.
Turning off heuristics didn’t work.
Accessing my site via a google link brings up a page with the tracking code in it.
Try searching for “veganwonderland” and click any of the results leading to "vegan-wonderland.de"
Since it has been working before and I haven’t changed anything I guess something was broken during the update.
Referrals are counted only once per visit, i.e., on entry. If you visited your site by direct entry, and then visited your site using an off-site link, without waiting 30 minutes and clearing your cookies, then both page views would have been counted as a single visit, with the direct entry as the referer.