Quote:
Originally posted by holograph
will not work with surfers using Norton Internet Security, as referer is not passed with NIS being on.
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While this is true, how many users are using that excact piece of software? On one of our paysites the content provider relies on HTTP_REFERER to be the paysite's members area when a user is sent to it. We have rarely had any problems with it though.
Also, can anyone give me a good reason why a piece of firewall software should block the browser's HTTP_REFERER? I can understand blocking for example USER_AGENT to not let the site throw the browser a version-specific exploit, but how does it make sense with HTTP_REFERER?
The only fairly valid reason I can think of is privacy-freaks which refuses to send any site the address they came from, but that is not a good enough reason for making this the default setting in such a high profile firewall application.
Anyway, thinking about this I decided to post a screenshot from the affiliate program (the one I made, mentioned it earlier) we use for one of our sites, to show you what kind of handy information you can retrieve by using such a method.
The screenshots show's the top #20 unregistered sites in our system. That means, all sites not registered by an affiliate. That mostly includes search engines, some top lists etc.
The numbers are hits, sales and conversion rates. Also have in mind these are SMS sales, which is the lesser used payment method on our site. The credit card sales are not counted here as our beloved Verotel takes care of that.
As you can see for yourself, in terms of optimizing profits such information as the picture above is great to see which areas needs work, etc.
Also, the picture above groups all the referers by domain to create a count per domain. If we want, we can also see detailed statistics on search engine keywords, etc.
Wouldn't it be easier to improve your sites with such information?