What is the difference between the Referring Sites report and the Referrer Summary report?

Environment:

Oracle B2C Service version(s):  November 2011 and newer

Resolution:

The Referring Sites report (ID 163) references the clickstreams table which is the raw data from the web site user activity. This data is brought into the table via the Data Query Analyzer (DQA) utility.

The Referrer Summary report (ID 213) references the kf_referrer_stats table which is processed data from the clickstreams table.   Logic is applied to the clickstreams data via the Dataminer utility which does some logic analysis and filtering to remove "invalid" information.

The Dataminer utility in the analysis of referrer details does two relevant actions.

1.  The analysis only examines referrer URL's that actually have a search of some sort.  By  default only google, bing, and yahoo important referrers will be considered.  

2.  The second analysis disregards some search terms.  A lot of searches match the above criteria but do not have any search terms so these are ignored.  Search terms are also checked against the site's word lists/exclude lists which may ignore other searches.

In summary, the Referrer Summary report curates information whereas the Referrer Sites reports on raw data.  Therefore the results for the same time period for the two reports may have significant differences.

For more information, see the following published answers:

Answer ID 8512: Search engines included in Referring Searches-type reports

Answer ID 8513: Referring Sites report not consistent with Top Referring Searches From Google report