Introduction

Traffic attribution helps you to determine where visitors to your app have come from and which marketing channels are driving engagement. With a mobile app, we generally see the vast majority of traffic coming as a result of the user directly opening the app, but there are cases when you may want to understand other ways that users are landing on the app - for example from emails, social media posts or links on your website.

There are three approaches you can use to build a better view of your traffic.

Implementing UTM Parameters

UTM parameters can be added to the end of URLs that open in your app and will pass that information into Google Analytics. A UTM link will always contain the following information:

• Source: where the user has come from, e.g. newsletter
• Medium: the marketing medium used, e.g. email
• Campaign: the specific campaign, e.g. 270824newsletter

It is also possible to use other parameters such as term and content.

To construct the UTM link, you can either use a UTM builder or you can manually add them to your link by placing a question mark at the end of the link and following it with a string in a format such as:

utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=270824newsletter

If you are using app links and the Pugpig redirect service, your link to an article would there therefore look like this:

https://app.yourdomain.com/story/12345/content.html?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=270824newsletter

If you are deeplinking directly into app content it would look like this: 

app.pugpig.com/[article_postname]/content.html?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=270824newsletter

Within Google Analytics, you can view the source, medium and campaign information either within the acquisition reports or by using the relevant dimensions in an exploration. Google's documentation explains in detail the different ways to use these dimensions.

Pugpig Events

In addition, our Pugpig analytics tracks users who land on the app as a result of opening a push notification. We are able to identify the campaign if it has been passed through from the push provider. 

Using an traffic attribution partner

Whilst the options above will help to identify traffic sources and can provide some high-level information they are not comprehensive and rely on Google Analytics. 

Therefore, if more detailed reporting is required, a mobile measurement platform like Appsflyer or Branch might be a solution worth considering.