why does wordpress dashboard appear as a referral in my stats?

  • Unknown's avatar
    drnicko · Member ·

    My stats have started to increase every time i look at my posts. This seems to correlate with my wordpress dashboard showing up as a referral to the blog. I don’t think its ever done this before – but its having the effect of articially increasing the useage figures. How can i sort this out?

    The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

  • Unknown's avatar
    rachelmcr · Member ·

    Hi there,

    Since your blog is public, your own visits to your blog shouldn’t be counted in your stats. It sounds like there might be a bug causing this to happen. I’ve reported it to our team, and they will take a look at this for you. Thanks for letting us know!

  • Unknown's avatar
    drnicko · Member ·

    That’s brilliant – thanks very much!

  • Unknown's avatar
    rachelmcr · Member ·

    Hi there,

    While investigating this issue, our team came up with a few questions for you:

    1. Do you have third-party cookies enabled in your browser? If you aren’t sure, you can check here: Third Party Cookies
    2. Do you have cookies blocked on your domain drnicko.com?
    3. How do you usually navigate between your blog’s dashboard and your blog posts? Do you open the links in Incognito Mode?
    4. When you view your blog, are you still logged in to your WordPress.com account? (Do you see the dark grey admin bar at the top of the screen?)

    The answers to these questions will help us understand what might be causing the WordPress Dashboard to appear as a referrer on the blog. Thanks!

  • Unknown's avatar
    drnicko · Member ·

    Hi – thanks for getting back to me.
    1. No, I don’t have third party cookies enabled. SHould I?

    2. I don’t think I’ve got them blocked in my drnicko.com domain either. Where would i find that out?

    3. No, I don’t use in cognito mode. I usually just go straight to the stats, and if a post has been read, i click on it to see what it was. in the past, that has never registered as a ‘view’ – but now it does.

    4. and yes, when i view the blog i do see a dark grey bar at the top – with my gravatar in the far right corner with a drop down menu which would allow me to log out if i wanted to.

    Is this any help?

  • Unknown's avatar
    rachelmcr · Member ·

    Thanks for providing that additional info — it does help.

    Cookies are used to store your login information on a specific domain. When you log in to your account here, a cookie is stored at WordPress.com so you can stay logged in.

    Because you have a custom domain, the login cookie stored at WordPress.com is a third party cookie when you visit your site (because your site has a different domain). If third party cookies are disabled, you may not be recognized as being logged in when you visit your site. This could be interfering with how your visits are counted in your blog stats.

    I’ll check with our team to see if that might be the issue with your stats, and in the meantime you can try enabling third party cookies to see if that fixes it for you. To view and change your cookie settings (for third party cookies and blocked cookies) in Chrome, you can follow the instructions on this page: https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/95647?hl=en

    Please let me know if this resolves the issue for you! :)

  • Unknown's avatar
    drnicko · Member ·

    Thanks Rachel. The wierd thing is that the problem seems to have solved itself over the last 12 hours! I’ve been clicking on my posts and checking the stats and for some reason, they don’t now register as either views or as wordpress dashboard referrals. So whatever you’ve done, its now behaving itself! So many thanks for that!

    I’m a bit of a geek when it comes to my stats – so i wondered, is it possible to amend the data to take out the wordpress dashboard views? there’s only about 25+ of them I know – but they are a teeny bit irritating as i know they weren’t views by other people but just by me, clicking on my own site! I appreciate it if this is being a bit pernickity – but if you can do it, then i’d appreciate it.

    Otherwise – i think the original problem is solved! so many thanks again. I’ll let you know if it comes back!

  • Unknown's avatar
    rachelmcr · Member ·

    I’m glad this problem is solved for you! Please do let me know if it comes back. :)

    Unfortunately, there isn’t a way for us to remove the WordPress Dashboard views from your stats, due to how we store blogs stats behind the scenes. Sorry about that!

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