Recover lost Android-based (direct / none) traffic

[metmarkosaric]

I wonder if a tweak like this would be possible for us to do for all the traffic we track on Plausible

[ukutaht]

Related issue in the upstream project that we use for referrer parsing: snowplow-referer-parser/referer-parser#131

Interestingly there doesn't seem tons of motivation to fix and one person suspects it's referrer spam.

To me these android-app referrers seem totally legit and I think we should be parsing these as explained in the blog post. Currently we also classify these as Direct / None.

We don't need upstream to implement it, we could add our own rules on top. It's not very difficult to add this.

Great find @metmarkosaric.

[metmarkosaric]

nice! that would be a great feature! this trick is being spread around the marketing world and people are manually fixing it for themselves but i don't know any analytics tool that uncovers it by default. would be really useful!

[metmarkosaric]

"we switched to Plausible a few months ago. However, we're still using our own analytics because we're not able to filter Google Discover traffic. the referrer can be used to correctly identify Discover traffic. From a privacy perspective absolutely uncritical, from a publisher perspective a fantastic enhancement."

(feedback via email)

It's also possible to track Google Discover traffic with this method. More at https://valentin.app/discover-tracking.html

"After applying the filter described later on you will see something similar to the following screenshot. Users from Google Discover will show up as www.google.com and com.google.android.googlequicksearchbox/ while traffic from www.google.com/ is Google Search."

[metmarkosaric]

Update: Starting from yesterday evening, we're attempting to uncover traffic originating from Android apps which is traditionally categorized as direct in Google Analytics and other analytics tools. The volume of "android-app" entries in your "Top Sources" report will vary based on your site and audience. For sites with significant mobile traffic, this could recover 10% or more previously unattributed traffic from apps like Gmail, Slack and Telegram.

[Filippo-Marcel-Lisuzzo]

hello, are there any updates regarding google discover traffic tracking?