jurijsk / traffic-source-go-getter

What is that?

This script to store the last non-direct traffic source information for later, with a couple of additional features.

Why it is needed?

When your visitor creates an account, you want to know how they found your website. Was it Google Ad, Post on Facebook, the link you posted on Reddit, or something else?

This information is usually passed with URL params, (utm tags, gclid, gclsrc, fbclid, msclkid etc) and with document.referrer.

Often you want to send this information to your backend system, CMS, CRM, or what-have-you. Yes, Google Analytics does the same, but it will not send it to your backend.

The problem is that the time the visitor clicks "Create an account" all this information is gone because the user clicked around and both URL and referrer already changed. This script collect this info and store it in the cookies (this is configurable).

How to use it?

Deployment

Deploy it with the rest of your code or shove it to GTM's HTML tag and trigger on page load.

On page load

new TrafficSourceGoGetter();

You can also configure a bunch. See Configuration below.

Getting the data

var trafficSource = (new TrafficSourceGoGetter()).getTrafficSource();

{source: string | undefined
  , medium: string | undefined
  , campaign: string | undefined
  , term: string | undefined
  , content: string | undefined
  , auxParam1: "see on that below"
 }

or if you prefer to have data as seen in Google analytics

var trafficSource = (new TrafficSourceGoGetter()).getTrafficSource();

//for direct traffic returns
{source: "(direct)", medium: "(none)", campaign: "(not set)", term: "(not set)", content: "(not set)"}

toString(current = false) function

current: if true, ignores stored cookie and parses all the data again to return,

As and alternative to get data toString() function return data in shorthanded format:

cs=campaign-source;cm=campaign-medium;cn=;auxParams_prop_value=param-value-from-queryString;
//

Shorthand param names match Measurement Protocol campaign params

That is the logic?

It mostly matches Google Analytics logic for determining the traffic source, with some deviations.

If few words:

Then the page in loaded, we look for the information is out there:

1. UTM tags always have the higher priority. UTM is the only way to get keywords and campaign info. So use UTM even with auto-tagging.
2. If no UTM tags provided, we look at tracking params gclid, gclsrc, fbclid, msclkid.

• gclid means google/cpc, unless there also msclkid then it is bing/cpc.
• fbclid gives you source facebook but does not indicate if the medium was paid or not.

3. if no tracking params, we look at 'document.referrer'. If it matches one of the search engines, then {searchengine}/organic otherwise 'referral'.
4. Everything falls back to to (direct)/(none)

After that we store the data in cookies, unless the visit was direct (this is configurable, see below).

On the next user visit/page load, we check if stored traffic source in more valuable compared with current traffic source:

1. If current visit is direct - we keep previous traffic source.
2. If current visit is non-direct (referal, organic, cpc, display) - we override stored data with current traffic source.

Configuration

new TrafficSourceGoGetter({
	auxQueryStringParams: {'kw': 'custom_keywords', 'q': 'query', 'gclid': 'gclid'},
	domain: 'specific.li'
	persist: customFunction
});

auxQueryStringParams

type: {[key: string]: string}

default: none

If you need to extract and custom query string params from URL, pass and object where each property is query string &param and value is a name of the property in trafficSource object. E.g. when {'q': 'search_query'} and &q is present the call to `getter.getTrackingSource with result:

{
  'search_query': 'Aaah, my butt looks like a pizza'
  ...
}

domain

type: string default: document.location.hostname Used to determinate if the traffic is referral or direct and to set the cookie. If you use multiple subdomain, consider passing domain value.

persist

type: boolean | (trafficSource?: null | TrafficSource) => TrafficSource

default: true

Use to change storage behavior. Default, when true stores to cookieName. To turn off storage pass false.

To override the behavior completely, pass the function with acts both as a getter and seter.

function narniaBroker(trafficSource){
  if(trafficSource === null){
    //narnia.eraseTrafficSource();
  } else if (trafficSource === undefined) {
    return narnia.getTrafficSource();
  } else {
    narnia.storeTrafficSource(trafficSource);
  }
}

The method will be called to persist or get the data. Erase scenario is not used. And we also should pass auxQueryStringParams as well but we are not doing it yet :)

cookieName

type: string

default: traffic_source

debugging

type: boolean

default: false

Set to true to get some messages in the console.

Honorable mentions

I was not the first to think about it, I looked into the work of others. Namely:

• trafficSourceTracker.js by marketlytics
• utm-alternative by dm-guy
• and utmz-cookie-replicator-gtm by Lovely people at bounteous.com

Thanks a bunch!