Lost in direct traffic
Where is your hospital’s mobile-app info hiding?
The deeper you dive into your Google Analytics and ad server reports, the more you’ll start to realize discrepancies between data (i.e. web visits and click-through rates). To put it simply, web visits and click-through rates are entirely different beasts and that’s why it’s difficult to compare those numbers with accuracy.
According to one report, certain interferences can take place between the time a user “clicks” on an ad and “visits” your site, such as certain ad blockers or firewalls that don’t allow Google Analytics to track visitor information or a dropped connection and so forth.
Referring information gets even foggier when it comes to mobile apps.
The issue with mobile apps
In a white paper “Google Analytics: What Every Advertiser Should Know,” written by industry thought leaders at Pandora, it discusses how mobile apps are unable to pass “referring page” information to your site analytics, and consequently, app-based traffic is reported incorrectly. Instead, it appears “underreported” and “miscategorized” as Direct Traffic. Think about it. If you’re conducting a multimedia campaign for a service line, and mobile apps are included in media, referring information may be hiding in direct traffic. So if you see a dramatic spike in direct traffic — a channel that measures when a URL is typed directly into a browser— it’s likely that increase can be attributed to referring traffic.
“For Pandora specifically, more than 80% of total listening hours occur on mobile and other connected devices, meaning that this reason alone can create severe discrepancies between reports.” Pandora is not alone. As apps from Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, etc.. continue to rise in popularity, the more you’ll notice an increase in referring information that is unavailable to you.
According to an article in Search Engine Land, if a user clicks on your hospital’s URL, status post or link in the Facebook App it will initiate a new browser session and gets recorded as a hit to the homepage and is logged in Direct Traffic. On the second click, the referring information is recorded as facebook.com in analytics, but there is no way of understanding whether it came from the Facebook App itself or a desktop.
The solution? Well, while we may not be able to track referring information from mobile apps, we can “audit” our analytics. Pay attention to traffic to your direct and referring channels during a campaign and adjust your marketing goals accordingly.