Traffic Source Reporting
Source tracking can be split into two broad categories:
- Parent traffic source which indicates how the user arrived at the clients parent website
- Lodging traffic source which indicates how the user arrived at the lodging sub-domain
Ripe only has access to the lodging source attribute since we typically don't have tracking deployed on the client's site to capture the parent source. However, the client has access to both traffic sources assuming they have Google Analytics or a similar tool deployed on both domains.
The source attributes discussed in this documents refer specifically to the lodging source which is available to Ripe. See example illustration below.
Traffic Source Parameters
The following 4 parameters are available for lodging source reporting:
Traffic Source Type
Traffic Source Name
Traffic Source Domain
Traffic Source Path
Traffic Source Type
The Traffic Source Type
parameter categorizes how users entered the lodging sub-domain. The possible values are listed below.
- search_widget
- internal_link
- external_link
- affiliate_search_widget
- affiliate_link
- direct
The logic is as follows:
- If an affiliate parameter is defined and the
Source
query string parameter set toSearchWidget
then the resulting value isaffiliate_search_widget
- If an affiliate parameter is defined and the
Source
parameter is not set then the value isaffiliate_link
- If
Source
query string parameter is set toSearchWidget
then value issearch_widget
- If the top-level referring domain matches the current domain then the value is
internal_link
- If top-level referring domain does not match the current domain then the value is
external_link
- If the referring domain is not defined then the value is
direct
Traffic Source Name
The Traffic Source Name
parameter is an optional attribute that can be explicitly set to a custom value via the lodging_source
query string parameter. This gives the client the complete freedom to assign any source value to both internal or external links.
The values are automatically tracked in Ripe's Google Analytics account and can easily be added to the Client's account as well. Please see the 'Lodging Source Tracking Setup' document for instructions details.
Traffic Source Domain
Set to the referring URL domain; could be the client's parent domain or an external domain.
Traffic Source Path
Set to the referring URL path
Updated about 1 month ago