Definitions of default referrer types

General questions
1

Hello there, can someone please point me to where I can find a definition of what data Matomo uses to put visits in their default referrer types (Direct, Search Engines, Websites, Campaigns), so the equivalent to this one for Google Analytics -> https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/3297892, but for Matomo?
I’m especially interested in how Matomo decides what visit will be put into the Campaigns referrer type.

I tried the search here in the forum as well as Matomo blog and FAQ, but wasnt able to find answers to either question.

Thanks in advance!

2

Hi,

The definitions for which sites are search engines and which ones are social sites is from https://github.com/matomo-org/searchengine-and-social-list (you can contribute more sites there if you feel like one is missing)

Campaigns are detected if you have set up campaign tracking: https://matomo.org/docs/tracking-campaigns/

Websites are requests that have a valid Referrer (you can check document.referrer in the JS console on the tracked site to see what Matomo can see).

And everything else is Direct.

3

@Lukas Thanks for your answer!

Is it possible to custome the default referrer types (again like in GA) to create your own referrer definitions?

Use case “own companies” -> referrer without campaign parameter from websites of the same company group)

4

That means any visit sorted to “Campaigns” should be a refferer with a tracking parameter, right? If a user comes 1. time via refferer with a tracking parameter, but a 2. time via a referrer without tracking parameter, then the 1. visit should be a “Campaigns”, the 2. visit a “Website”, correct?

I’m asking since I seem to have a case where there are more “Campaigns” visits then there are visits via a refferer with a tracking parameter. I’m trying to figure out the reason for that atm.

I tried to get to the bottom of this by checking the visits logs for “Campaign” visits only, and wondered, why there are visits from users that do not seem to come from source “Campaign”, what gives me headdaches.

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Thanks for your advice!

5

Hi @Lukas, any additional thoughts would be highly appreciated. :slight_smile: