Your visitor tracker reports provide you with a “Landing Page URL” that reflects the full browser URL paths of the pages being viewed by the website visitors. When you browse your “Page Loads” report, the full landing page URL is shown individually for each page load.
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If you are utilizing a basic HTML visitor tracking code, the “Landing Page” URL is provided by the website visitor’s web browser. Most recent multi-browser change within the default web browser’s configuration applies a specific configuration that prevents the full path Landing Page data from being properly registered by statistics software that utilizes basic HTML code tracking.
If you do not see a full path Landing Page URL entry on your “Page Loads” report and only see your domain name, then you need to apply a simple modification to enforce a proper “Landing Page Policy” in order for your basic HTML tracker to record the full path of the pages being viewed by your website visitors.
To instruct your website visitor browsers to follow a correct “Landing Page” policy, enter the following line between your website’s existing <head> tags like so:
<head>
<meta name="referrer" content="no-referrer-when-downgrade">
</head>
You may need to edit your website’s template to find and insert the above line between the tags. Do not add additional <head> tags. You need to locate the existing tags and place a single line as displayed above just below the opening <head> tag. Once you have added the line, check a few pages of your website to make sure that the additional line appears in the source code of the pages.
If for any reason you are not able to add a modification to your website’s “<head> tags, then try adding the same line just before your website visitor tracker code like so
<meta name="referrer" content="no-referrer-when-downgrade">
* Place your website visitor HTML tracker code just below the above line. Do not add the above line if you utilize a JavaScript version of the tracker.
Your HTML website tracker code should now log the full “Landing Page URL”
Why the default browser “Referrer-Policy” has been changed
With the original default policy [no-referrer-when-downgrade], the HTTP `Referer` header provided the full URL of the initiating document including the full path and query parameters for each request. This allowed the advertisers to collect the browsing patterns and to optimize their ads inventory. Consequently, this same feature allowed webmasters who use third-party website statistics software to collect data about the visitors and their website navigational habits.
In order to make it harder for advertisers to do their job, the web browser producers have changed the default [no-referrer-when-downgrade] policy to [strict-origin-when-cross-origin], which effectively prevented the accessibility of statistics. This in turn directly affected website publishers who use similar tools to analyze their website’s operational status.
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