There might be cases when using reporting that you see listed hosts and urls that you don’t operate.
There are 2 known situations when this can happen:
- When your articles specify a canonical outside of your property
- When users use a reverse proxy
- Shared Google Tag Manager across sites
- Audits on referral pages
External canonical
By default, Marfeel attributes the traffic to the canonical URL informed on the page. If you are using syndicated content from a third-party site you might have to keep their canonical. On Marfeel all the traffic will be classified under the canonical url and domain, which might be different from your main domain.
If you want you can change the attribution using mrf:canonical
Reverse proxy
There are platforms and tools that allow users to browse sites using a reverse proxy. The users consume your site content from sites like nproxy.org, anonymouspreview.org or anonymousviewer.org. These sites get a copy of your site and serve it to their readers. Marfeel JS tracks these sessions and respects the canonical they inform which, in lots of cases, is rewritten to the proxied domain.
Shared Google Tag Manager
In case Marfeel is implemented via Google Tag Manager make sure it’s only active on the desired sites. In multi property GTM instances you might deploy the pixel to multiple properties by mistake.
Audits of pages on domains you don’t own
The Marfeel Editorial crawler crawls any url with a real user hit. If it’s under the same domain, It also crawls the referral url to provide Previous pages information.
URLs discovered by the Editorial crawler are then processed by the Audits crawler.
There are publishers that add the Marfeel pixel only on certain folders or urls that live within the main domain of a different publication. i.e. The marfeel pixel is only present on domainA.com/folder/article but not on domainA.com. When a user coming from a page like domainA.com/any/referral recirculates to domainA.com/folder/article the Marfeel Editorial Crawler will crawl both the article and domainA.com/any/referral urls. If any audit triggers on the latter, Marfeel will report the issues too even if the pixel is not present on the referral pages.