Users arrive at your website or application through a variety of sources, including advertising campaigns, search engines, and social networks. This article describes how Marfeel collects, processes, and attributes traffic to sources and mediums.
Note that each session can be attributed to only one campaign, traffic source, and traffic medium. Thus, if new campaign or traffic source values are sent to Analytics at collection time in the middle of an existing session, it causes the current session to end and a new session to start.
The process by which traffic medium, traffic source, and campaign data is sent to Marfeel and populated in reports follows these steps:
- Collection via the SDK. Parameters like the referral, campaign, user agent, and session id are sent to Marfeel
- Processing: Collected values are used to populate the final report dimensions according to a processing logic and matching tables
- Reporting
Find below a list of the most relevant traffic mediums and sources.
Search
Search-engine referral data is processed by comparing the hostname and query parameter of the document referrer field to a list of known search engines and their query parameters.
Users who arrive at your website or application from a link on Google Search.
Google Discover
Users who arrive at your website or application from a link on Google Discover.
Google Showcase
Users who arrive at your website or application from a link on Google Showcase, which is identified as a traffic source. Marfeel helps publishers identify if the traffic comes from Google News or from Discover by including them as traffic mediums under Other.
Publishers can personalize the type of card used to display content on Google Showcase.
Marfeel reports the type of card that brought the visit in real time on the Campaign dimension.
Social
Social network referral data is processed by comparing a list of known social networks to the hostname set in the document referrer field and user agent parts.
Users who arrive at your website or application from a link on Facebook.
Dark Social
Dark Social is a traffic source used to describe direct traffic from mobile and desktop devices visiting long URLs that are assumed to have been shared through private messaging platforms, such as Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, or Telegram. These platforms were traditionally mobile, but in recent times their desktop versions have gained in popularity, due to which Marfeel applies the same attribution criteria for Mobile and Desktop traffic presenting the same attributes.
This type of traffic cannot be accurately tracked by traditional analytics tools. However, Dark Social can be a high-quality signal, as it indicates that two humans have curated the relevance of the content: the person who originally read the content and decided to share it with someone else, and the person receiving the link.
Articles with a higher percentage of Dark Social traffic can be good candidates for your homepage, newsletter, or push notifications.
In case you see a Dark Social spike or exceptionally high dark social, in might be related to untagged push notifications or native applications. Check the troubleshooting section for further details.
Users who arrive at your website or application from a link on Instagram.
Paid
Google Paid Campaigns
A session is processed as a paid-search referral when custom campaign parameters or Google Ads / Google Marketing Platform click IDs are used in the ad’s destination URL and are sent to Marfeel.
Note: If a paid link is shared, the recipient will compute as Paid darksocial
Facebook Paid Campaigns
A session is processed as a paid-facebook referral when custom utm parameters are used. In these cases the Facebook source shows two mediums, with organic traffic included under Social Media and ad traffic under Other > Paid):
If you see a duplicated Facebook source, check the Troubleshooting section for possible causes.
Google Shopping
A session is processed as a paid-google shopping referral.
Direct
A session is processed as direct traffic when no information about the referral source is available, the most common cause being that the user typed the domain into their browser.
Marfeel also identifies certain other types of traffic as direct, such as traffic from Bookmarks, and branded Search traffic:
Direct > Bookmarkgives visibility of URLs that users are saving (such as sports scores pages or stock market charts), or that are visited multiple times and the browser starts to recommend.Direct > Search. All publishers have a lot of traffic to the homepage from search engines from people already looking for their brand. After validating that more than 99% of the search traffic to the home page Marfeel classifies search traffic to the homepage asdirect/search engine namefor exampledirect/Google.
Referral
A session is processed as referral based on the precedence host.
In case you see self-referrals from your own domains it might be due to internal redirections or delayed Marfeel SDK loading times. Check the troubleshooting section for further details.
xxx.ampproject
Self-referring sessions from your amp pages recirculating to your web version.