Attention! Do not use the methods described below with tracking tools that use both, server-side tracking and JavaScript tracking. The data collected by them will slightly differ, leading to inaccurate reports. At the moment, no tools that you can integrate with WP Full Picture use server-side tracking mechanism.
Did you know that all the tracking tools you use show you slightly incorrect information about your traffic sources?
Up to 20% of your Direct traffic can actually be your “Referral” traffic from Android applications. And almost all traffic coming from organic links from Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest comes from dozens of domains instead of one per site!
Fortunately, you can fix these and other traffic sources issues with simple settings in the WP Full Picture plugin. And, best of all, once you do the setup, all your tracking tools (so not only those installed in WP Full Picture) will start seeing the correct traffic sources.
Now, go to the “Traffic Sources Modifications” section of the “General Settings” page and… let’s start fixin’.
How to see traffic from Android apps
Did you know that tracking tools do not recognize traffic from non-http sources? For example, smartphone apps which open links to your website “inside them” will not be recognized as sources of traffic.
As a result, all this traffic is labelled as “Direct”. But there is a way to fix it for Android apps.
How does it work?
You all know what HTTP sources look like, e.g. https://facebook.com or https://google.com. They are just simple domains.
Non-HTTP sources on the other hand look like this: android-app://com.google.android.googlequicksearchbox/
The former are recognized by tracking tools. The latter are not.
What can we do about it? Simple. Give non-http sources a domain which you can later see in your traffic reports.
WP Full Picture lets you do that quickly and easily. Simply write a part of the non-http url in a field and write a domain (you can invent one) that will show up as the new traffic source in your reports.
In the example above, I am replacing all the traffic sources that contain the word “googlequicksearchbox” with the domain “android-g-search-box.com” and all sources that contain the word “pinterest” with “pinterest.com” domain.
How to find non-http referrers?
You can do it very easily with Google Analytics 4.
- Go to the “Explore” section and create a new, empty report.
- Add data to the table as shown below (1st image).
- Filter the results to show you only referrers that don’t contain HTTP (2nd image)
After that, you will see a list of all non-http traffic sources. Copy them, paste them in WP Full Picture’s settings as shown in the first image in this section and give them any domain you want. From that moment, all your traffic from these sources will be visible in your traffic sources report in your favourite tracking tools!
And what if you don’t see any non-http results?
Well, it may mean that you are not getting any or that your website is too new. But it does not mean that it won’t change in the future. So keep this report and return to it every now and again.
How to ignore traffic from payment gateways
As you know, shopping cart plugins let you set up different payment gateways that will process payments, e.g. PayPal or Stripe.
Usually, once a person makes the payment on their website, they are redirected to the order confirmation page in store.
Now, if you open your traffic analytics tool and analyse the sources of traffic that brought you the most clients, you will see… paypal.com, stripe.com, etc.
This is because analytics tools consider the last traffic source as the one responsible for the conversion.
Look at this situation.
Google Ad > store > PayPal > store (order confirmation page)Here, PayPal is the last traffic source and will get the credit – not Google Ads.
But there is a simple fix.
First, find the settings called “Change traffic source domain / URL on these pages”.
Next, enter the URL of your “order confirmation” page in the first field and paste the checkout page URL in the other one.
Now, every time someone goes from checkout to payment gateway and then back to your website, the payment gateway will not be visible as the source of traffic that brought you customers. So it will look like this:
Google Ad > store > store (order confirmation page)This way, all the credit will go to the source that actually brought you the traffic. Sweat 🙂
How to see single domains referring social traffic
If some of your traffic comes from Facebook’s, Instagram’s or Pinterest’s non-labelled links (without UTMs) you will see in your traffic reports that they don’t come from single domains (like facebook.com or instagram.com) but from many.
This is especially visible with Pinterest traffic.
Obviously, this chaos makes analysing social traffic sources more complicated. Thankfully, WP Full Picture has a solution for that.
Simply, enable these options and, from that moment, your traffic from Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest will be referred to correctly.
All traffic from these 3 platforms will be coming only from facebook.com, instagram.com and pinterest.com domains. With no variations that make traffic analysis more difficult.