Find below a round-up of common stumbling blocks related to custom traffic attributions on Marfeel and how to overcome them.
Unusually high dark social traffic
Increases in dark social traffic can be due to a couple of different causes:
Unattributed push notifications traffic
If you are sending push notifications to users without UTM tagging the traffic will be attributed as Dark Social due to the fact that the traffic will land directly on an article details page.
You can easily identify if this is your problem if you see traffic bursts on your site.
Hybrid native applications
It’s common for iOS and Android applications to follow a hybrid development approach where the main content feed or home page is native and the article details load inside a Webview.
In this scenario, when a user clicks on article on the native homepage, it will generate a pageview on the Webview identified as Dark Social.
You can solve this issue by identifying your Webview version.
Duplicated traffic source
There might be cases where you see duplicated Traffic Sources. For example, in the screenshot below, Facebook appears twice.
Marfeel is case sensitive with all utm parameters. If one URL has utm_source=Facebook and the second one has utm_source=facebook, you will end up with traffic divided across two different traffic sources that are in fact one single source.
As you can see in the example above, on Compass the source will appear in camelcase regardless of how the utm tag is written. If you notice duplicate traffic sources, check your attributions with case sensitivity in mind.
Self-referral domains
If you see your own domains as self-referrals, consider reviewing the following scenarios:
Internal redirections
If you are using any form of 30X redirections you’ll see your own domain as a referral source. Make sure these redirections are really necessary and not an error—one that could impact your SEO.
Marfeel SDK loading too late
Sessions where a user clicks on a link and recirculates to another of your pages before the Marfeel SDK can load on the first page are tracked as self-referrals. This happens because the Marfeel SDK is late at tracking the original referral of the session.
The Marfeel SDK is a lightweight performant Javascript, so if this happens it’s often because it’s being loaded with very low priority on the page or at the end of the waterfall on Google Tag Manager.
Try adding the Marfeel SDK inline in your html or moving up its priority.