Hi all,
Since the HTTP to HTTPS change last summer, a number of Wikipedia Library
and GLAM partners have reported a drop in traffic reported as "referrals"
from Wikipedia, where many of these referrals are being reported as organic
referrals, effectively creating "dark traffic".
Dario Taraborelli from the research team, worked with Wikimedia Ops to find
a solution to this problem. He and I are also working with a number of
movement partners to understand this effect, and better assess how
Wikipedia references provide referrals to frequently cited websites (see
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research_talk:Wikimedia_referrer_policy and
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T87276 ).
Last Tuesday (Feb 23) the ops team turned on a new "meta referrer tag" so
that sites getting traffic via clicks from Wikimedia pages may see these
referrals in analytics reports. Several publishers have of an increase in
correctly labeled Wikimedia traffic.
Since this effect has been in place for about a week: you may want to let
your partners at cultural heritage institutions know about this change.
Historically, referrals have been a indicator of partnership success and a
persuasive tool for organizations to participate, and the HTTPS change may
have obscured this.
Moreover, if your GLAM partners would be interested in supporting by
sharing referral traffic: we will be collecting partner analytics data from
January 1 to March 30 in about a month. Let me know if you think your GLAM
partner would like to participate.
Cheers,
Alex Stinson