NULL referrers in contribution_tracking
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In standup it was stated that this was only coming from amazon mobile and iPad amazon users.

Hello fr-tech,

As part of our reporting on the Big English campaign, I've been looking into the referrer column in contribution_tracking more. We are already excluding referrer = 'googleweblight.com/' from our analysis (due to T152602).

However there appear to be a large number of entries with NULL referrer. These are spread across banners and email, and particularly common on mobile and iPad. For PayPal and Amazon they seem to convert well, but for credit card they rarely result in a donation which is dragging our rates down.

Do you have any thoughts on what could be causing these, and why it would have an effect on conversion? Would it be something to do with the fraud filter?

Thanks,
Peter

Related Objects

Mentioned In: T182039: investigate: Record user agent in contribution_tracking
T163615: Are we inserting extra contribution tracking rows
Mentioned Here: T152602: Spurious Amazon clicks / Banners on googleweblight.com

Event Timeline

• DStrine created this task.Mar 27 2017, 5:18 PM

Restricted Application added a subscriber: Aklapper. · View Herald TranscriptMar 27 2017, 5:18 PM

Pcoombe renamed this task from Amazon Ipad and mobile NULL referrer to NULL referrers.Mar 27 2017, 6:38 PM

These are *not* only from Amazon. See a breakdown here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/10Pkd3W72s3BlEI6IX5VzECk0fiOIdlhZAbdxijaP9qg/edit#gid=0

Amazon does have a particularly large number of these, but that is probably related to the googleweblight problems we had which artificially inflated the total number of clicks.

I'm more concerned about the large number of credit card clicks which don't seem to be converting at all.

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I looked in the payment logs from today for one server, searching for donation attempts that had a null referrer. I decided to correlate by banner history log ID since that was easy to find in the request logs. It looks like ALL of those requests came in without a referrer header.

That's just the ones which have a banner history log ID, though. I'll see what I can find about ones without it.

Those also seem to mostly come in with no referrer header. Taking a look at the CC ones in particular now to see if they are clearly duplicates or something.

I definitely see a lot of entries with multiple ct_ids associated with the same banner history id. Makes me think we're starting new sessions for people more often than we should!

Definitely looking like multiple c_t rows for a single banner click. Of the 20k ipd/cc/null referrer cases, 15k have a banner history log ID associated. Among those, 6425 have another contribution_tracking ID sharing the same banner history log ID. 2288 of those led to donations, and 2700 of those had a referrer on the other ct_id.

Ejegg mentioned this in T163615: Are we inserting extra contribution tracking rows.Apr 21 2017, 11:58 PM

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Krinkle renamed this task from NULL referrers to NULL referrers in contribution_tracking.Jul 17 2018, 6:56 AM

Krinkle added a project: MediaWiki-extensions-ContributionTracking.

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