On 18 November 2015 at 15:07, Toby Negrin <tnegrin@wikimedia.org> wrote:

In general, we struggle with these external sources of information. (And this extends to the industry in general). The Research team expended a lot of energy to correct the way another service interpreted our traffic and I believe this feedback was not incorporated.

"Not all websites implement our on-site analytics and publish the results. For these sites, we show estimated metrics based on traffic patterns across the web as a whole. We identify these patterns by looking at the activity of millions of web users throughout the world, and using data normalization to correct for any biases."

With regards to this specific topic, Discovery is starting to explore metrics like what percentage of our traffic comes from referrers. You can see our efforts on https://discovery.wmflabs.org/external/. Developing this dashboard is a secondary priority for the Discovery Analysis Team right now; we're prioritising more directly supporting our product development with A/B test analysis and dashboarding.

Thanks,

Dan