Why "referrer" is bad for tracking

[Receptional]

Does your tracking system rely on "referrer" data to track it's data sources? You should really check...

You ARE, by the way, unless you have actively set up another tagging method for any individual campaign

Why is this so important? Well I have been running some ads on Facebook and testing various things. Because I can, I set the advert itself up as an affiliate, so that the advert linked directly into the affiliate program for better conversion tracking.

Here's what I found.

1. The Facebook interface says it has sent through about 1,000 clicks so far (out of a million impressions btw).

2. The affiliate tracking system only saw 788 of this - which is another question entirely. of these, 744 were unique BUT...

3. Of the 788 clicks, 455 had the referrer data blocked!

Now I KNOW that these clicks must have come from this particular advert, which means that well over half of the data would have appeared in most statistics packages as "direct traffic", which gives credit to the brand when it is not necessarily due.

If this is also happening to the same level with search engine traffic (which you can't tag, unless it is paid ads) then SEOs have a problem. You may not be getting the rewards you deserve.

[Lord Majestic]

Cookies are really a must for such tracking - a lot of purchasing decisions are delayed so they won't happen in that session, the user might actually remember site and then run a search afterwards to find it again.

[Receptional]

But even using cookies, if the referring data doesn't get to the tracking system in the first instance, then all a cookie does is compound the problem by then suggesting that sales or other actions are carried out by people coming directly to the site, when in-fact they came via a marketing channel.

Some ad-serving systems aim to drop cookies when the advert is displayed. This would help I am sure, but then you are forced to use their tracking through to sale... no doubt giving different data yet again to your own tracking system.

[Lord Majestic]

The cookie should be from value set uniquely in that URL used on external sites, at least that's how we did that in 2000-2002 when I was doing this sort of stuff. :)

[Receptional]

Not so easy when using Facebook's ad-interface. Nor Adwords or other PPC systems come to that (unless I missed something). That's OK though, in those instances, because you can use a tag or unique landing page URL. Then the cookie gets properly dropped on arrival.

The cookie on the external site is great when it is available as an option. Not always possible though.

[Lord Majestic]

Yep, tagging the landing page URL is the way to go - I am suprised that many years on this is not a standard technique.