Organic Referrer Attribution

Note

This feature is not yet available in the Airbridge dashboard. Contact your Airbridge CSM to enable it.

Marketing success requires a balanced strategy that encompasses both organic and paid efforts. The dual approach ensures a holistic understanding of the user journey.

Organic referrer attribution provides insights into your owned media and their performance on search engines. This allows conversions that can’t be attributed to ad channels to be still measured with high granularity, mending any possible gaps in attribution.

Tracking Organic Conversions

In the Airbridge dashboard, users who have installed the app without interacting with an advertisement are categorized as “unattributed” with only limited information available. However, by activating organic referrer attribution, you can gain visibility into the search engines the users utilized to discover your app and the website they visited immediately before installing your app.

How Airbridge collects data with referrers

A referrer serves as a digital breadcrumb trail that tells you where a user was before landing on a web page. Airbridge uses referrers to measure your organic performance and provides the attribution results via reports and raw data exports.

The basic structure of a referrer resembles a web address, commonly known as a URL. Components such as the scheme, host, path, and query parameters build a referrer, but the specific composition may vary.

Attention

Referrer information is limited on some platforms. You may not always have access to all the details about the preceding web page.

Attribution scenarios

To enable organic referrer attribution, you must have integrated the Airbridge Web SDK into your website. Below are some attribution scenarios.

Attribution rules

With organic referrer attribution enabled, Airbridge can collect touchpoint data from your owned media and search engines. By connecting touchpoints with conversions, Airbridge reconstructs the user journey and determines the winning touchpoint according to the Airbridge attribution model.

Note that organic referrer attribution can’t be used if referrers can’t be collected.

  • App installs attribution: Organic referrer attribution can’t be used to attribute app installs because no referrer information is available.

  • Some platforms: Organic referrer attribution can’t be used on some platforms because referrer information is not available or is only available on a limited basis.

Organic Referrer Attribution Setup

Note

Organic referrer attribution setup is not yet available in the Airbridge dashboard. Contact your Airbridge CSM to modify your settings.

Enable organic referrer attribution for specific domains and configure query parameters for specific information. Before setting up organic referrer attribution, refer to this article to integrate the Airbridge Web SDK.

Domain setup

Define the scope of data collection by specifying domains to track. You can either exclude or include a domain, and organic referrer attribution will be enabled only for the included domains. Below is an example scenario of the domain setup.

Attention

Updates to the list of excluded and included domains take time to be reflected in your organic referrer attribution results. For more details, refer to this article.

Query parameter setup

Referrer structures vary, with each query parameter carrying distinct information. Airbridge allows you to designate parameters to be mapped to Term. For instance, you can view the data collected by selecting the “Term” GroupBy or filter in the Actuals Report.

Below is the default mapping setting:

  • The q, query, qt, and p parameters are all mapped to Term.

  • The mapping priority is in the order of q, query, qt, and p.

You can customize the settings by domain, adding a new parameter to be mapped to Term, or adjusting the mapping priority.

How to View Organic Referrer Attribution Results

Airbridge provides organic referrer attribution results via reports and raw data exports.

To view the attribution results in the Actuals Report, select the “Touchpoint Generation Type” GroupBy. Under the column of the same name, you will see Organic Referrer, along with other touchpoint data collection methods. You can also use the filter to sort out data whose Touchpoint Generation Type is Organic Referrer. If you want to get the list of fully qualified domain names (FQDNs) of the attributed media sources, select the “Channel” GroupBy.

When exporting raw data, you can select the Touchpoint Generation Type data property or filter by Touchpoint Generation Type.

Attention

Was this page helpful?

Have any questions or suggestions?