Exclude referrers from conversion attribution

DanielHug · May 16, 2022, 3:49pm

I would like to exclude a referrer from multi-channel conversion attribution. Our payment provider sometimes refers visitors back to our site and thus gets credited with a lot of conversions, which is nonsense, of course. Is there a way to prevent that from happening?
Thanks a lot in advance!
Daniel

heurteph-ei · May 16, 2022, 3:55pm

See:

github.com/matomo-org/matomo

Understand why conversions are sometimes attributed to "Direct entry" or the payment provider, instead of the current channel

opened 03:58AM - 13 Jan 22 UTC

tsteur

Bug c: Tracking

from https://forum.matomo.org/t/referral-exclusions/33582/25 The resolution s…uggested by Matomo in this article https://matomo.org/faq/how-to/how-do-i-add-a-referral-exclusion-in-matomo/ does not really address the underlying issue - it merely recategorizes the referrer from “website” to “direct entry”, which in reality isn’t the true referrer for the user’s visit. Here is an example of what is happening. 1. User clicks on an email link to visit the website. 2. User browses website and adds items to basket (at this stage referrer is “Email campaign”) 3. User completes the order but and website redirects to 3rd party payment provider (paypal/amazon etc) 4. User returns to website (but now the referrer for the visit is reset from “Email campaign” to “website” or if you have set the referrer exclusions it will be set to “direct entry”. What we need is for it to remain as “Email Campaign”. As a result we are over attributing the channel “direct entry” greatly (40% vs 15% on GA). I'm not sure if we actually should call this feature "Referrer exclusion" as it's more like an "ignore refrerrer" or "keep the original referrer"? We wouldn't exclude this tracking request. We would still track that referrer but re-use the original referrer from the same visit. If it's from a different visit then we would use again a direct visit?

DanielHug · May 17, 2022, 7:10am

Thanks a lot! This is obviously a problem for a lot of people - is there a way to incentivize a solution? Maybe through crowdfunding? This is an important feature, and I imagine it will turn many users off if they can’t see which campaigns work and which don’t…

Daniel

heurteph-ei · May 17, 2022, 7:21am

https://fr.matomo.org/about/sponsors/

DanielHug · May 17, 2022, 10:16am

@Lukas what are the chances of getting this problem fixed soon - or what would the requirements be to get it fixed soon?

Lukas · May 17, 2022, 10:17am

I didn’t follow the discussion recently, but I think the last post in the issue might help you:

github.com/matomo-org/matomo

Understand why conversions are sometimes attributed to "Direct entry" or the payment provider, instead of the current channel

opened 03:58AM - 13 Jan 22 UTC

tsteur

Bug c: Tracking

from https://forum.matomo.org/t/referral-exclusions/33582/25 The resolution s…uggested by Matomo in this article https://matomo.org/faq/how-to/how-do-i-add-a-referral-exclusion-in-matomo/ does not really address the underlying issue - it merely recategorizes the referrer from “website” to “direct entry”, which in reality isn’t the true referrer for the user’s visit. Here is an example of what is happening. 1. User clicks on an email link to visit the website. 2. User browses website and adds items to basket (at this stage referrer is “Email campaign”) 3. User completes the order but and website redirects to 3rd party payment provider (paypal/amazon etc) 4. User returns to website (but now the referrer for the visit is reset from “Email campaign” to “website” or if you have set the referrer exclusions it will be set to “direct entry”. What we need is for it to remain as “Email Campaign”. As a result we are over attributing the channel “direct entry” greatly (40% vs 15% on GA). I'm not sure if we actually should call this feature "Referrer exclusion" as it's more like an "ignore refrerrer" or "keep the original referrer"? We wouldn't exclude this tracking request. We would still track that referrer but re-use the original referrer from the same visit. If it's from a different visit then we would use again a direct visit?

DanielHug · May 17, 2022, 1:07pm

@Lukas Great, I can see you are actively working on a solution to this.

adsham · May 25, 2022, 11:21am

Hi Daniel

I just came across your post - I have been campaigning for a fix for this since the start of the year since it lost us an existing client (due to the wildly inaccurate attribution figures - you can see some of my examples of overreporting direct entry for example).

It does appear to under the consideration of the developer now with it currently marked for the next release milestone.

If you have anything to add, real world instances of this for example you might want to consider adding it to the issue, I also encourage you to review the posts by the developer to ensure we get the right solution to this!

Thanks