My mobile organic traffic is categorized as referral traffic in HubSpot Analytics

[_ashleyquintana]

Could we find a way to resolve this? It would be wonderful if AMP traffic was actually categorized as organic search traffic instead of referral traffic.

As an agency, we work hard to generate organic traffic for our clients, but reporting in HubSpot isn't giving us that credit.

Here's an example from one of our accounts. Our top performing channels (from a conversion perspective) are Referrals and Organic Search. However, upon a closer look, we see that "referrals" aren't really referral traffic at all.

We love that HubSpot immediately takes care of AMP for us, however any sessions and contacts are being attributed under "Referral" traffic instead of organic search.

Here's what we see in HubSpot.

Additionally, there are other variations listed including "ampproject.org" and "amphubspot.net"

I know in theory, I can rebuild a custom field and some workflows that can "rebuild" the attribution, but it would be nice to use everything out of the box with proper attribution.

[_ashleyquintana]

Thanks Pam.

I understand, technically speaking, what's happening. Still, it makes it more difficult to actually report back to our clients on what is happening. In an ideal world I'd love to be able to select how certain domains within Referral Traffic are categorized. It would be wonderful to have the ability to split Referral Traffic into sub-categories for directories, review sites, etc.

[PamCotton]

Hello @_ashleyquintana, 

I would highly recommend you to please post this idea at our ideas forum (here).

Our product team, who monitors the forum regularly, can read your specific use case and understand why this would be a useful functionality or change. It also helps other customers facing the same issue to advocate for its implementation on your behalf by upvoting on the thread as well.

Kindly,

Pam

[PamCotton]

Hello @_ashleyquintana, Happy Friday!

Thank you for the information provided about the source of referrals in your traffic analytics reports. 

To give some context regarding this,

• AMP refers to Accelerated Mobile Pages, which are pages designed to give mobile users a lightning-fast, more engaging experience.
• Seeing this in terms of the traffic analytics report indicates that the user is viewing Google's cached version of the AMP content.
• When Google is crawling your content, it will see that AMP variant and crawl it as well. From there, Google will often cache AMP content and return it over their servers rather than our servers. As a result, a user can go to Google on mobile > put in a relevant search query > see an AMP article from your website that is served over Google's CDN instead of HubSpot.

From checking a similar case, our product team mentioned that the reason these URLs will not working when you try to go to them directly through traffic analytics has to do with the way that they get cached at Google's server level.

There's an authentication process with cached AMP content being returned which hinges upon accessing the cached data through the search engine; since we're not returning content through Google's search engine in-app, that authentication component does not work and Google's CDN returns an error.

At the moment we will not be able to trace back the exact referring site that your visitors landing on, as the user is viewing Google's cached version of the AMP content.

I hope this information helps.

Pam