How to use URL parameters

When you want to know where visitors are coming from you can add certain parameters to your URL. Browsers send the previous page (referrer) to the next page so you can see where a visitor did come from. There are a few ways how we determine where a visitor comes from.

Using an URL parameter

First we check the referrer for the parameters ref, source, and utm_source. So if you link your website in your email it’s wise to add something like this:

https://example.com/path?ref=email

This way Simple Analytics knows where the visitor did come from (email) and will save this information and show it in the dashboard (as a referrer).

Forbidden characters

Certain character are not allowed in the URL parameters. Letter and numbers are always okay. If you want to use special characters (like spaces, ;, /, ?, :, @, &, =, +, $, or ,) you need to escape your URL parameter. A good website that does this for you is urlencoder.io.

Valid examples of URL parameters:

https://example.com/?ref=email-button
https://example.com/?ref=docs.simpleanalytics.com
https://example.com/?ref=android%3A%2F%2Fcom.example.app%2Fpath
https://example.com/?ref=exister%2C%20avoir%20une%20r%C3%A9alit%C3%A9

The referrer URL is only used the there are no URL parameters found

Using the referrer URL

If there is no parameter found we save the URL of the referrer. We only save the part before any ? or #. So for example if the referrer URL is https://app.referrer.com/search?query=sensitive+information we only store app.referrer.com/search. Note that the protocol (https://) is gone. We also delete common subdomains like www., m., l., and www2. from the URL.

You don’t have to do anything to make this work.

Parsing of values

We parse the URL parameters differently then the referrer URL. Because people generate the URL parameters themselves we don’t want to touch those too much. What we do is we decode their values (so you can use forbidden characters) and convert hostnames to more general names. For example we convert www.google.com to google. We still store the original value, but we show google as a referrer in the dashboard. We do this so we can combine similar referrers into one. So we count www.google.com, google.nl, and google.fr as google.

Referrer URLs contain the full URL that the browser gives us. It’s something like https://www.referrer.com/search?query=sensitive+information. From this URL we store only referrer.com as the referrer and we keep referrer.com/search as the original referrer. We drop the query, protocol, and common subdomain.