Analytics, probably Google, and Funraise
pantheon record referrers google analytics
https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2795830?hl=en
https://propecta.com/google-analytics-fake-traffic
https://www.drupal.org/sandbox/dsnopek/2844722 via https://www.drupal.org/project/ga_tokenizer/issues/2312527
Background
We’re increasingly building out our own implementation of analytics software here, as thoroughly documented in #7511. Possible reasons that the referrer is incorrectly showing as actionagainsthunger.org itself include:
- The cookie isn’t getting set on the home page or (reliably?) any page other than the donate page, so if someone is linked to the home page and then donates, the referrer will be actionagainsthunger.
- Possibly the same thing happens if the donation page is linked to with any kind of in-site redirect (which Pantheon is basically at war with, per https://pantheon.io/docs/pantheon_stripped/ “We recommend distributing campaign URLs that are in their final, non-redirectable form and avoid using PHP redirects.” ).
- Also, if anyone has ever visited the site via the home page and then visited another page, the FirstSession cookie remains. I haven’t double-checked that the ReturningSession cookie is used if available, but the problem is likely primarily or entirely these first two issues.
These and other things are all dealt with, or at least grappled with, by analytics software like Google Analytics.
This Funraise help post implies that their new version 2 has or will have integration with Google Analytics: http://help.funraise.io/giving-form/giving-form-v2
Another alternative is if Funraise can export its analytics, the https://www.drupal.org/project/google_analytics_referrer module would allow a very clean set of referrer data, processed from Google Analytics (essentially what i would expect Funraise to do, if it would accept integration with the site’s Google Analytics account) and we could bring these sets of data together.
In short: I think this is a good time to review analytics strategy more wholistically before continuing to refine our parallel analytics handling.
(Note: Referrer information cannot be extracted from Google’s API in time to pass it into the Funraise form, which is why the parallel analytics work was started in the first place, and why i’m looking for ways to connect the buckets of data later.)
The preference is for the referrer information to be visible in Funraise’s analytics, rather than Funraise completion information to be in Google Analytics or some other location, correct?
Funraise has no API documentation i can find but it’s worth asking about the above. I can do that if given access.