Visits from search engines or campaigns are not recorded, Matomo shows “There is no data for this report” for all Referrers reports.

There are a few possible explanations:

• Are your pages tagged correctly?
  If you click on your website in a search result, and look at your page source, can you see the Matomo tracking code? Make sure the Matomo tracking code is installed on all the pages you want to track, and is not within an iframe. We advise to put the Matomo code just before the </body> tag.

• Are you using a redirect on your website landing page?
  If you are using a redirect, the visitor browser may lose the referrer information. If you are tracking campaigns, and the landing page has a redirect, the URL loaded after the redirection will have lost the URL parameters. Make sure that your visitors arrive directly on the page with the Matomo tracking code installed.

• Is your website using HTTPS (SSL)?
  Most websites these days are running over HTTPS. When someone is visiting another website over HTTPS and clicking on a link to your website, you want to make sure that the link to your website also references the HTTPS version of your website. (If a user on a HTTPS website clicks on a link to a HTTP page, the referrer will not be passed to the HTTP page). Therefore to make sure that all your referrers are correctly tracked in Matomo, you need to make sure that your website works on HTTPS and also that your links from other websites to your website use the HTTPS version of your website URLs.

• Matomo only records 1 referrer by visit, which means that only the first referrer used to access the website will be recorded.
  If you search for a keyword in a search engine, click on your website in the search engine results, and land on a page with the Matomo tracker, you may expect to see the keyword in your Matomo reports.
  However, if you visited your website less than 30 minutes ago, Matomo will recognize you as an known visitor on the website, will record your page view, but will not update your visit referrer. Matomo only record the first referrer of a visit. When testing Matomo and search engine detection, make sure you make the test more than 30 minutes after your last page view on your website.

• Check that the Matomo domain name in your Javascript tracking code is correct.
  This URL is in the second line of the Matomo tracking code. There have been cases of missing referrers when the Matomo (Piwik) JS code in the pages points to a URL that returns a 302 response instead of the final destination. It seems that some webserver compromise the tracking request when such redirects occur. Check in particular if the URL (doesn’t) contains “www.”. Also, if the server does an automatic redirection from http to https which also affects tracking requests to piwik.php, it might create problems such as missing referrer data. Make such any http->https redirection excludes piwik.php requests.

• Check if your referrers use noreferrer attributes on the link to your website.
  If referrers link to your website using URLs with noreferrer attributes, it will block the HTTP referrer header from being sent. This prevents Matomo from identifying the site where your visitors came from. In a browser, open the referrer’s site and use the browser’s View page source feature to look for the rel="noreferrer" attribute in your website’s link tag. If noreferrer is present, request if they can remove the attribute, or create a new URL for the referrer to replace on their website. Use Matomo’s URL builder to construct an URL with utm parameters to identify the source of traffic.

If you have some data in Acquisition reports, but you’re finding discrepancies with other tools, see the FAQ: Visits and clicks data provided by search engines or affiliates do not match the acquisition reports in Matomo?