Traffic Source Reporting

Source tracking can be split into two broad categories:

1. Parent traffic source which indicates how the user arrived at the clients parent website
2. 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 to SearchWidget then the resulting value is affiliate_search_widget
• If an affiliate parameter is defined and the Source parameter is not set then the value is affiliate_link
• If Source query string parameter is set to SearchWidget then value is search_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