Revisit: Updating referrer attribution of a visit when 2 channels are used within a same visit (current behavior is to override a "Direct" channel whenever possible)

[sgiehl]

This is a follow-up issue to the discussion in #18612

Summary

When a visitor visits the page, the visit will be attributed to a certain referrer. This can currently be website, campaign, search engine or social network. If non of this referrer can be detected the visit will be attributed as direct.

When a visitor afterwards revisits the page coming from another referrer and the referrer was previously attributed as direct, we currently may update the attribution to this new referrer. See workflow below:

Current Attribution workflow

Conclusion

Updating the referrer in that case might not be correct, as the visitor initially came directly to the page, but would then be attributed to another channel.

As far as I know the code to update the referrer was initially added to fix some issue, where the referrer was not yet set with the first tracking request, but was sent with a later one. Not updating the referrer in that case, would then mean incorrectly attributing the visit as direct, instead of the correct referrer.

A possible solution could be to only set/update the referrer until the very first page view tracking request of a visit. This would solve the issue, that other tracking requests might have already created a visit without a referrer, as it would then be updated with the page view request.

Changing any behavior in referrer attribution might result in differently tracked data and thus changing numbers. As this might bring trouble, we should not change that outside of a major release.
Also we should consider to do that using a config flag, that will only be activated for new installs automatically, so it won't harm any existing install by default.

[MatomoForumNotifications]

This issue has been mentioned on Matomo forums. There might be relevant details there:

https://forum.matomo.org/t/multi-channel-conversion-attribution-models-comparison/45580/12

[MatomoForumNotifications]

This issue has been mentioned on Matomo forums. There might be relevant details there:

https://forum.matomo.org/t/marketing-campaigns-tracking-cross-site/47909/2

[frimipiso]

Hi,

are there any updates on this issue?

I still have problems that sessions wherein a visitor pays via paypal are attributed to paypal as a referrer, which makes ad attribution impossible,.

Thanks

Jens

P.S.: I think this is the biggest show stopper in matomo which makes it impossible to use it in a professional way. Currently, if you really want to attribute sales when using Google ads, the only way forward is to use Google Analytics, since all payments via paypal are not attributed correctly.

Am I really the only user that wants to use Matomo in a professional way?

Also, how can Motomo expect to sell the Google Ads plugin for 150 $/year if the majority of sales cannot be attributed to the Google Ads channel?

[sgiehl]

Hi @frimipiso
We have added some methods to Matomo and the JavaScript tracker that allow you to add paypal to a list of referrers that will be ignored. That should prevent any incorrect attribution to it. See https://matomo.org/faq/how-to/how-do-i-add-a-referral-exclusion-in-matomo/