Google Analytics Shows Referral path of just " / " when there should be a path. What might cause this?

Question

I have a small but not insignificant segment of traffic coming from a third-party landing page creation tool. The pages live on their servers and ultimately drive users to pages on our site.

All the URLs of these landing pages start with a subdomain of the platform, i.e., view.platform.com. The source should be that subdomain, and that's correct.

Referral paths however should start with "/our-account" and then whatever we set as the URL slug for the page, so the referral path of anything coming from these landing pages should only be paths like /our-account/july-sale, which some of them are, but the bulk (40%) of the traffic with a source of view.platform.com has a referral path of just " / " (or Full Referrer Path of view.platform.com/ if you use that dimension).

I should mention that we only have a handful of these landing pages right now (like 3) so we know for sure that the traffic with no referral path is coming from 1 of 3 places, we just don't know which one in the case of 40% of the total landing page traffic.

view.platform.com just forwards to the main website for the tool, and there's no way any of this traffic would be coming from there naturally.

Why would anything after view.platform.com be stripped from Google Analytics? Anyone have any thoughts?

The landing pages are HTTP, and they're linking to our site which is HTTPS, but I read that shouldn't be a problem. It's only an issue the other way around.

The landing pages are also not traditional regular HTML pages, but rather generated by JavaScript.

The landing pages also use symlinks if that matters. Users navigate to them as view.platform.com/our-account/landingpage/ but then it turns into view.platform.com/our-account/landingpage/p/1

Answer 1

You can consult this https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Referrer-Policy and double check which policy is applied in the originating document.

You can also check the requests in the network tab to check which referrer is set in the request headers

You can inspect the requests that Google analytics send to its server to check what is being sent.