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Referring domain is "None" > 70% of new users

  • 5 April 2023
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When I do a segmentation analysis for any event, new users, and then group by referring domain, >70% of unique users have “none” referring domain. 

The blue bar is “none”

 

This is very very unexpected, and don’t believe that 70% of new users type in the url of our app without finding it from another source. 

 

I understand that if events are fired before user properties are sent, then those events will not have any referring domain, but I’m having trouble confirming if this is the issue or not, and what the solution should be? For a users’ first event in a session, should we force the identify calls to resolve prior to sending any subsequent event data?

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Best answer by dangrainger 6 April 2023, 12:06

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Hi @racarman245. Not sure how you’re wiring up Amplitude, but your logic at the end is sound….i.e. ensure that you’re pushing the identify calls before events. In our setup we’re using the Marketing Analytics Browser SDK in GTM, but telling GTM to enforce a fire of the identify call before every Amplitude event…

 

 

...it works just fine for us, grabbing the correct referrer and marketing parameter data.

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Thanks @dangrainger! We are using the Analytics Browser SDK, but not with GA or GTM. We’ve made a change to enforce Identify calls prior to event calls, but still seeing mostly the same odd behavior. I guess its possible that ~70% visit the app directly with no referrer, but that would be pretty surprising. 

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Thanks @dangrainger! We are using the Analytics Browser SDK, but not with GA or GTM. We’ve made a change to enforce Identify calls prior to event calls, but still seeing mostly the same odd behavior. I guess its possible that ~70% visit the app directly with no referrer, but that would be pretty surprising. 

@racarman245 seeing the same issue here after implementing in July. Is your traffic still showing this or what was your resolution? We’re also using GTM Analytics Browser SDK.

Thanks!

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Unfortunately, no I was never able to resolve. We attempted to force identify calls prior to event track calls, but that didn’t help. Pretty unfortunate because it makes any kind of attribution analysis impossible. And its rather unlikely we are seeing so many “organic” (non referred) user visits. 

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@racarman245 One thing Dan reminded me is in your Initialization tag in the Initialization section be sure to Exclude Referring domains/screen to prevent them from starting a new session. Curious to know if this helps your implementation. Thanks

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