Our self-hosted Matomo analytics shows all iOS e-commerce orders as coming from ‘Direct’ every month. Orders from other OSes shows the usual mix of Direct, Organic, Website, etc. so the issue is specific to iOS.
This is causing a few issues for our advertising campaigns as we aren’t able to accurately see all the orders they generate. This is compounded by over half our sales coming from iPhones.
Has anyone else seen this, and does anyone have any suggestions for how to work around it? We do tag our campaigns with trackable URLs (utm_source, etc.) but that seems to make no difference for iOS traffic.
I’ve seen similar attribution issues with iOS, especially when privacy protections or browser tracking restrictions interfere with referral data. I’d first check whether the UTMs are still present on the landing page and whether Matomo is correctly persisting them through the checkout flow. It may also be worth comparing the raw Matomo logs with the order data to see where the attribution is being lost.
If you’re tracking website conversions, it’s also useful to test the complete journey on an iPhone from the campaign URL through checkout. For example, we’ve had to pay close attention to attribution and tracking on service websites such as to make sure important visitor journeys are measured correctly.