Traffic Sources Issues

Hi all,

I've got a website with plenty of users arriving via email and the URLs are always set with appropriate UTM parameters.

In GA4 it's recording 2527 sessions as having originated from the traffic source 'email' while in clicky it's only 9. There's no console errors and everything is setup correctly.

What on earth is going wrong?!

huh?

If I look in GA4 at the number of users between two dates in December, it reports 13,586 across 20,088 sessions. Clicky reports 18,499 visitors. These numbers are within each other's ballpark ranges.

However, if I look at the traffic sources, GA4 records 2,843 having arrived via email (i.e. each of these users has the utm_source=email URL parameter set) whereas in Clicky it's only 36?

It looks to me like Clicky has assigned (or reassigned) these users as Direct or Search traffic?

Hi, we support UTM parameters but only if "utm_campaign" is one of them, as that's kind of the "core" parameter that we group all other parameters around, so if that one is missing, then all UTMs are discarded.

Are you only using utm_source? If so then that's why it's being ignored.

Here's an example URL:

https://www.examninja.co.uk/year-5-sats-practice-papers-pack-ages-9-10/?utm_source=07012024&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Y5-Papers&eal=p2jQ9Ss6/vMi+MNbz1truepIP61CuxjbeWblY+f/ohU=

When I use Incognito and check Clicky's Spy mode it shows the user as having arrived via Search?

Hi, sorry I didn't see your last reply.

I just tested it now and it was logged properly, it doesn't show a search referrer or anything. That may be the result of a tracking cookie.

Here was me just now:

https://clicky.com/stats/visitors-actions?site_id=101414754&date=2024-01-23&session_id=662640862

But it does appear there's a bug with email tagging, as I do not show up in the email filter list:

https://clicky.com/stats/visitors?site_id=101414754&date=2024-01-23&source=Email

So I'll dig into that shortly...

Okay so looking at the backend code, if there's no referrer, then source will always be set to "direct".

It is by design. But whether we might set a source without a referrer, or never set a source without a referrer... it's confusing either way. It's one of these things where I kind of just want to change it now, but am already seeing the future where we have other customers asking where all these new email or other type of visitors started coming from, even though they changed nothing.

Ideally it would be a preference but it's a bit of an edge case that affects only a small number of people, so making a preference for that also seems over the top.

But I've made note of this in our giant wish list file, so maybe we can address it later.

Ok well thank you for investigating. I can see your problem with regards to confusing other customers but I think I'll have to migrate away from Clicky if it's not remedied in some way as it means our API derived reports aren't useful.