ExpressionEngine

2.11.9 User Guide

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Referrer

Introduction

The Referrer Module enables you to track where visitors to your site came from.

For example, if the URL to your site appears as a link at your friend’s site, when someone clicks the link, your friend’s URL will show up in your referrer page.

To access the Referrer Module Control Panel, go to Add-Ons ‣ Modules ‣ Referrer. You can globally enable or disable referrer tracking, as well as set the maximum number of referrers to keep, by clicking the Referrer Preferences button.

To display your referrer information in a template, use the following code:

<table border="0" width="100%" cellpadding="6" cellspacing="1">
        <tr>
                <th>Date</th>
                <th>From</th>
                <th>IP Address</th>
                <th>To</th>
        </tr>
        {exp:referrer limit="50" popup="yes"}
                <tr>
                        <td>{ref_date format="%m/%d/%Y"}</td>
                        <td>{ref_from}</td>
                        <td>{ref_ip}</td>
                        <td>{ref_to}</td>
                </tr>
        {/exp:referrer}
</table>

Note

Enclose from the opening <tr> to the closing </tr> since that is the portion that gets repeated for each referrer.

Parameters

limit=

limit="50"

The number of results you want to see

Variables

ref_agent

{ref_agent}

The user agent that made the referral to the site. For most cases, the “user agent” is simply a web browser that visited your site. The {ref_agent} variable outputs the full user agent string recorded by ExpressionEngine. It might look something like:

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.0)

Which is the common user agent string for Internet Explorer 5.5 running on a Windows 2000 machine.

ref_agent_short

{ref_agent_short}

A shortened version of the user agent that made the referral to the site.It might look something like:

Mozilla/5.0

ref_date

{ref_date format="%m/%d/%Y"}

The date on which the referral was made.

ref_from

{ref_from}

The URL of the referring site.

ref_ip

{ref_ip}

The IP address of the referring site.

ref_to

{ref_to}

The URL of the page they arrived from.

switch=

{switch="option_one|option_two}

This variable permits you to alternate between any two values as the entries are displayed. The first entry will use “option_one”, the second will use “option_two”, the third “option_one”, and so on.

The most straightforward use for this would be to alternate colors. It could be used like so:

{exp:referrer limit="50" popup="yes"}
        <tr class="{switch="one|two"}">
                <td><div>{ref_from}</div></td>
                <td><div>{ref_to}</div></td>
        </tr>
{/exp:referrer}

The entries would then alternate between <tr class=”one”> and <tr class=”two”>.

Multiple instances of the {switch=} tag may be used and ExpressionEngine will intelligently keep track of each one.

Blacklist and Whitelist

You may want to utilize the Blacklist/Whitelist Module so that you can keep certain IP addresses, URLs, or even User Agents from being counted in your referrals as well as have a Whitelist that will automatically let matches through.