Referral exclusion¶
Referral exclusion is closely related to campaign tracking. Before reading this information, read about campaign tracking.
Usually, it is valuable information to know from which referrer a user came from. This should also result in a new session, as mentioned in the campaign tracking documentation. This way, it is possible to see the value of referrers.
Some referrers, however, should not trigger a new session, because they will contaminate your data. Two examples are:
- Payment service providers
- Own domains
Payment service providers¶
When a user is going through checkout, usually they will go to a third party to do the payment. When they go back to the website, you do not want to have the user start a new session. This will lead to the attribution of all sales to the payment service provider and you will not be able to see the value of your campaigns.
Own domains¶
What if you have 2 domains. Domain A is your “sales pitch website” and domain B is the actual webshop. All paid campaigns will link to your landing pages on domain A. ALl sales is done on domain B. The moment you do not use referral exclusion, all redirects from domain A to domain B, will lead to a new session on domain B. All sales therefore, will be attributed to domain A. When using referral exclusion, no new session is started and the existing campaign information will be attributed to the sales.
How does it work?¶
In the Harvest Console you can fill in a list of “domains” that should be excluded. Each entry in the list works based on regular expressions. This way you could easily generate exclusion for multiple domains.
When an event is tracked, Harvest will process the event. Referral exclusion will be processed during the enrichment phase of sessionData. For more information read about session management.
First we need to check whether there already is a current session or not.
If a session is active, referral exclusion makes sure no new session is created. Tracking wise nothing changes.
If there is no active session, referral exclusion leads to a new “direct” session. This is the same as when a user typed in the url directly or came from a bookmark. This does mean a session is created.
When a new session is created, the variable sessionData.rawReferrer will be filled with the referrer that was excluded.
