How to exclude a specific referring site from Experience Analytics?

Question

My parent company has "thoughtfully" referenced our public website in a frame on the home page of a mandatory-use intranet application, thereby guaranteeing we get a lot of referring traffic from the intranet's address. How do I suppress these visits in reports or even better, prevent them from being logged?

Answer 1

ReferingSite are kept into MongoDB on Interactions collection.

Please see below picture

The most suitable way to remove old referring site data from Analytics reports includes two steps:

1) Remove the unwanted references (ReferringSite) from "Interactions" collection of Mongo DB. It can be done by performing the following query:

db.getCollection('Interactions').update({"ReferringSite":"putYourSiteName"},{$unset:{"ReferringSite":""}})

This query should remove "ReferringSite" and fields of documents where specified ReferringSite exists.

2) Performing the Rebuilding of reporting database: https://doc.sitecore.net/sitecore_experience_platform/setting_up__maintaining/xdb/server_considerations/walkthrough_rebuilding_the_reporting_database

NB: I didn't test this queries on my environment. I recommend you to make a backup of the mongo db and reporting before running it.

Answer 2

I can think of two ways for you to do this.

1.) Overwrite the Sitecore.Analytics.Pipelines.CreateVisits pipeline in the Sitecore.Analytics DLL. There are a couple of changes you can do to prevent it, but to start there is a method called ParseReferrer that sets the value.

2.) You can use the Data Exchange Framework to create a process that removes the entry using MongoDB C# code. It will give you more flexibility if you have any other code cleanup things as well.