Marketing Campaigns tracking cross-site

justin.finkelstein · October 19, 2022, 9:20am

Hi all

We have a couple of linked websites where the user journey is domain.com → otherbit.domain.com, both of which have Matomo tracking on and are set up to use Matomo cookies across the root domain.

If a user arrives on domain.com with Marketing Campaign cookies, does Matomo “keep” these when the user moves across to the subdomain?

Thanks!

heurteph-ei · October 19, 2022, 9:41am

Hi @justin.finkelstein
Maybe have a look at:

github.com/matomo-org/matomo

Revisit: Updating referrer attribution of visits

opened 11:39AM - 22 Aug 22 UTC

sgiehl

Enhancement

This is a follow-up issue to the discussion in #18612 ### Summary When a v…isitor 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 ![Referrer Attribution](https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/1579355/169563862-c9cb78c0-a3f0-4ae8-a4ec-f4f0c64fc743.png) ### 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.

This may explain hot this will / should work

justin.finkelstein · October 19, 2022, 11:07am

Hi @heurteph-ei

Thanks for sharing that. I’ve worked through the flow chart and I think the user should be keeping their mtm_campaign parameter as this should be set in a cookie.

I’ve checked by testing this across our two sites and I can see the campaign attribute is lost.

I’ve also checked the settings referred to by that flow which are currently set to:

create_new_visit_when_campaign_changes = 1
create_new_visit_when_website_referrer_changes = 0

Am I missing something?

Is there a way I can debug this further?

Thanks!

heurteph-ei · October 19, 2022, 12:15pm

@SteveG can you help @justin.finkelstein?

justin.finkelstein · October 19, 2022, 12:28pm

I’ve just been chatting with a colleague who knows Matomo better than I and he’s pointed me to the Matomo documentation’s Javascript Tracking Guide (Measuring domains and/or subdomains).

From what he’s told me and what I can read, I understand this: If I have example.com set up as site ID 1 in Matomo and other.example.com as site ID 2, I cannot see user visits transitioning between to two unless I track both of these domains in the same site ID.

Is this correct?

JazleneHowe · July 7, 2023, 12:33am

Just stumbled upon this thread and wanted to say thanks for the help.

MakaylaChan · July 12, 2023, 4:42am

Hi there. Just stumbled upon this thread and wanted to share my 2 cents. Regarding your question, if a user arrives on domain com with Marketing Campaign cookies, Matomo should indeed keep these cookies when the user moves over to the subdomain. Matomo is designed to use cookies across the root domain, so the user’s journey should be tracked seamlessly. By the way, have you tried using any SMM followers to boost your campaigns? They can really help increase your online presence. Good luck