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Joseph_Making
Level 2
February 5, 2026
Question

Pinterest Ads showing no referring domain

  • February 5, 2026
  • 2 replies
  • 16 views

Hi everyone, 

Noticing in our data that the majority of iOS data from Pinterest (identified with campaign codes) comes in with an unspecified referrer and referring domain in Adobe Analytics. Wondering if the team knows of any reason this might happen? Maybe something with the webviews in their native app, or is there some known redirect they perform. I know pinterest is a large ad platform so hoping someone else has insight on this issue.

    2 replies

    Jennifer_Dungan
    Community Advisor and Adobe Champion
    Jennifer_DunganCommunity Advisor and Adobe Champion
    Community Advisor and Adobe Champion
    February 6, 2026

    Hi ​@Joseph_Making,

     

    Do you have a mobile app with Universal Linking? If you are only looking at “iOS” that can be a mix of both mobile web AND mobile app…. 

    Mobile Apps don’t track referrers by default, but you can capture and pass this information in your mobile apps with the AEP SDK since it uses DataStreams and Schemas (unlike the old AEC SDK which was limited to “traditional” app data, which assumed there were no referrers - basically concepts from before Universal Linking became prominent)

     

    If you do have an app, can you split the traffic you are checking to web vs app to confirm if this is the case?

     

    I presented a Rockstar Tip for this last year at Summit. The recording is posted on https://adobeanalyticsrockstar.com/best-analytics-tips/ (but the website doesn’t allow me to link directly to the specific recording, but I can at least link to a filtered view of my tips for that year: https://adobeanalyticsrockstar.com/best-analytics-tips/?_speaker=jennifer%20dungan&_year=2025).

    Jennifer_Dungan
    Community Advisor and Adobe Champion
    Jennifer_DunganCommunity Advisor and Adobe Champion
    Community Advisor and Adobe Champion
    February 6, 2026

    There’s one other possibility… if the ads are being shown in the Pinterest App, then the app may not have a referrer… a lot of apps don’t have referrers because they aren’t a website… Facebook usually does, because most links on Facebook go to m.facebook.com first (so that Facebook can collect clicks stats to show in their own internal reporting), but because a website is part of the flow, there is usually a referrer when it gets to your own tracking.

      J
      Joseph_MakingAuthor
      Level 2
      February 8, 2026

      hey Jennifer - thanks for your help. 

      In this case it’s ads either from Pinterest’s app or website linking to out website (no universal deeplink or anything, just a good old web link). 

      As I continue to investigate more closely my bet is this is due to ads in the iOS Pinterest native app referring clients to our browser site. On android I see a a referrer  ‘android-app://com.pinterest/’  but nothing similar for iOS. So it’s probably safari blocking Pinterest's attempt to manually pass the http referrer from app to my site’s browser.

        Jennifer_Dungan
        Community Advisor and Adobe Champion
        Jennifer_DunganCommunity Advisor and Adobe Champion
        Community Advisor and Adobe Champion
        February 9, 2026

        Some apps even work differently between iOS and Android. So either iOS’s “app” specific referrer is being blocked, or they don’t have one coded at all. 

         

        But, yes, those “non-referrers” are likely coming from Pinterest’s iOS app. They don’t like to make it easy for us do they? 😉

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