What does 'top referred topics' measure?

Data & reporting
1

I’ve searched and can’t find explicitly what the ‘Top Referred Topics’ measures. Does it include when a topic is clicked via search engine, or just when shared by a user?

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2

Top Referred Topics are the topics that have been shared most frequently by referrers. The number of clicks is the number of times people have clicked through from a referral link posted anywhere else on the Internet.

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3

Curious on the method/reliability of the metrics in the dashboard

Would that number ever show as lower than a previous report?

i.e. a hosting site removes the link so report shows one lower click

Could a topic on the report be removed without being knocked off by a higher clicked topic?

Hawk or anyone who knows, Thank you

4

@joffreyjaffeux can probably answer that for you

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5

This report is using IncomingLinksReport model:

https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/master/app/models/incoming_links_report.rb#L125

The query is basically:

  • Count of all IncomingLink in topics with archetype being Archetype.default
  • In a given category if specified
  • Between two dates
  • grouped by topic_id
  • keep a limited amount of the highest counts

An IncomingLink is created on topic show:
https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/master/app/controllers/topics_controller.rb#L946

The only operations that I’m aware of on IncomingLink are updating ip/owner. IncomingLink destruction happens only if you use destroy_task.

I might be missing a where clause, but AFAIK destroying a post won’t remove the IncomingLink record.

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6

Thank you so much, seems the main dashboard report is for 7 days which was causing my confusion,

sadly I’ve looked at it many times and never figured that out till now :facepalm:

I’d like to suggest a note on that

image

7

I have the same question, and alas the replies above and the admin page’s help tooltip don’t make it clear for me what exactly “Top Referred Topics” is in concrete terms. Could someone give the explanation for five-year-olds ?

8

It’s the top number of topics that have been shared by users somewhere else, and people have clicked on them.

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9

Let me rephrase that for myself, hopefully I have it right (?):

The Top Referred Topics report

  • shows topics in the current forum
  • which visitors have landed on after following a link to them from another site.
  • The “Clicks” column shows how many times this has happened.
  • Any such link on another site counts. It does not need to have been shared via the discourse Share button.
  • Navigating to a topic within the current forum, or following a link within a post body in the current forum, or typing a topic’s url directly into your browser address bar, does not count.

(There are a lot of ways to intepret this stuff when you’re unfamiliar. I guess “Referred” and “Clicks” are standard(ish) jargon but I would have understood “Top Topics Visited From Outside” and “Visits” quicker.)

10

I think for these they need to be ‘referred’ by someone (that is, be one of the links that includes your username at the end. Eg. If I popped this one on Facebook https://meta.discourse.org/t/what-does-top-referred-topics-measure/99464/7?u=jammydodger)

11

I feel some doubt about this, because my Top Referrers report is empty (which seems likely accurate, nobody is using the Share button yet), while my Top Referred Topics report has 10 items.

I wonder if it’s possible to see any more detail on incoming links / referring sites, when hosted by Discourse.

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