{"id":8123,"date":"2016-11-08T15:54:02","date_gmt":"2016-11-08T15:54:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.brainlabsdigital.com\/?p=8123"},"modified":"2025-06-20T18:30:45","modified_gmt":"2025-06-20T18:30:45","slug":"self-referrals-in-google-analytics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.brainlabsdigital.com\/self-referrals-in-google-analytics\/","title":{"rendered":"Self-Referrals in Google Analytics"},"content":{"rendered":"

A self-referral in Google Analytics is a session where the source is your own site. For example, on Distilled.net in September 2015, we had a bunch of sessions show up in Google Analytics like this:<\/p>\n

\"distilled<\/p>\n

This is often ignored or considered innocuous, but it represents something very wrong with the sessions it represents. It doesn\u2019t make sense for a user to have arrived on your site via your site – there must have been an original source, and we want to include every subsequent hit after that original landing as part of one big session, providing the user doesn\u2019t leave and come back via some other channel, or go inactive for a long period of time\u00a0(neither of which would appear as self-referrals).<\/p>\n

Back in June, I wrote a post<\/a> discussing the various ways in which Google Analytics can split sessions, with highly misleading results, and self-referrals are often a symptom of this. For example, take the two sessions below:<\/p>\n

\"whatThe second session on the right might well describe its source as a self-referral (e.g. arriving on distilled.net via distilled.net), and this is unhelpful because we can no longer attribute its conversion to Google Search, which is how the user actually found the site.<\/p>\n

Identifying self-referrals<\/h2>\n

\"distilled<\/p>\n

In the screenshot above, I\u2019ve simply gone to the \u201cReferrals\u201d report in Google Analytics and filtered for my own domain name – in this case, distilled.net. For the purposes of this example, \u00a0I\u2019ve also filtered down to a time period in September 2015 when I know Distilled had some self-referral issues.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s important to take a look at the metrics that are displayed here – in our case, the number of sessions was not hugely significant in the context of the site as a whole, and there were no conversions attributed to the self-referrals, which means that no conversion data was mis-attributed. If the number of sessions was large, or there were conversions in there, then this would represent a high priority problem. Ultimately, this comes down to your organisation\u2019s attitude to data – I think for most organisations, any conversions going awry is going to be a cause for concern, but the threshold for inaccuracy in sessions on their own may vary more.<\/p>\n

Diagnosis<\/h2>\n

Self-referrals can occur in one of two ways:<\/p>\n