Analytic sources coming from search pages?

Support
1

I’m looking at the analytics for my site blog.jim-nielsen.com and I’m seeing a bunch of traffic coming from search endpoints. Some of them make sense, like

{
  "count": 361,
  "resource": "www.bing.com/search"
}

Cool. Looks like traffic coming from Bing.

But others don’t make any sense at all. Maybe this is just a gap in my understanding, but where would traffic from these kinds of endpoints come from?

{
  "count": 703,
  "resource": "www.ted.com/search"
},
{
  "count": 501,
  "resource": "play.google.com/store/search"
},
{
  "count": 349,
  "resource": "steamcommunity.com/market/search"
},
{
  "count": 276,
  "resource": "www.usatoday.com/search/results"
}

A cursory search, for example, on ted.com doesn’t reveal anything from my blog—which is not surprising. What’s surprising is that ted.com is showing up in my analytics. How and/or why?

Any clarification would be helpful. Thank you!

3

Hi there, @jimniels :wave:

Sorry for the delay here, and thanks for reaching out! Do you have any sense of how long this traffic has been occurring? This is a bit above my knowledge grade, but I will loop in folks who may be able to support you here!

5

Hey there! I’ve had a quick look-see and your sources today seem sensical, so that’s good. I believe this is simply pulled from the referrer header. Perhaps there’s a gated portion within the TED site? Strange – yes! Impossible? Never :slight_smile:

1 Like
6

@hillary sorry, I don’t have a real sense for how long this has been going on, especially since I only have visibility into the last 30 days. That said, anecdotally, this is the first time I’ve seen things like TED or USA Today show up in my analytics.

@Scott thanks for looking at it. Your comment on impossibility makes sense. That said, I guess I’m just flummoxed at why I would get traffic from sites like TED or USA Today.

I guess this will just remain a mystery.