Whats up with document.referrer

Are you seeing this on pages on you directly type in the page on your site? In that case it would set the first page cookie, and probably not set the referrer cookie, because there is none. There is only a referrer if there is a page it came from.

Is your cookies set up to handle tracking if someone went to that page directly?

Well not really but every page checks to see if there is a entry cookie and a referrer cookie if one does not exist it writes it. So what I'm seeing is someone hits the homepage gets the homepage cookie, goes to the demo page where they should get the referrer cookie as the homepage but they don't. The lead comes in with a homepage entry cookie and no referrer cookie and I know they followed a link on my site so there should be a referrer cookie.

Can you reproduce this error, by going from the home page (directly typed in) and then click the link to your demo page.

Just a question to you though. wouldn't it make more sense for tracking purposes to set both of these cookies at once when they first hit your site? Wouldn't you want to know that they typed in your home page directly thus setting home page, and no referrer. Or followed a link to pageA.html on your site and get the referrer from that?

The way you have it. You have a mix of external sites and some internal sites for direct visits in your referrer log.

Also, is the link they are clicking on the home page written with the javascript document.write function, or is this link an ajax call? Because if it is either of these cases, then there would be no referrer.

Ok if I "by going from the home page (directly typed in) and then click the link to your demo page. " The cookies work for me. The entry cookie become Hompage and the referrer cookie is set when I click to the demo so it is the homepage as well. If I follow a link in, the cookie works for me too. It has to be a security setting or a strange browser case because I personally can't recreate the missed referrer.

I do set the cookies at the same time but I could make a case for the referrer which sets it to direct entry if there is no referrer, but for now that would not be the case because sometimes there is a referring site I just don't capture it.

Strange.