whatsapp.com added to the Adobe List of social networks

We'll see what we can do to get whatsapp added as a social network.

@kopkacobana: Quick question here. Are you looking for clicks from the WhatsApp app to be counted as a social network? Or WhatsApp on the web (which I'm told is now possible)? 

As far as I know, we currently don't do any automatic labeling of app clickthroughs as Social Networks (i.e. where we have to rely solely on a user-agent string rather than a referring URL). So that would be a bigger lift and would not be an imminent change. 

If web clicks (that have referrers) are what you're most interested in, we can probably make that change fairly soon. 

Whatsapp on the web is new to me and we were primarily focussed on the app (so  visits to our website from the whatsapp app).

@kopkacobana: It was new to me, too, but I found some info on it when searching for a referrer string to give to our engineering team. 

There's a broader concept of enhancing "Social Networks" to use user-agent strings to combat "dark social," which really what this request amounts to. As I mentioned, we don't currently have a good way to use the user-agent string rather than a referrer in reports that have heretofore been designed around referrers.

However, you (and others watching this thread) can of course use the user-agent string in Processing Rules to create a set of values to label as social referrers, as described here: http://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/analytics/shedding-light-dark-social-adobe-analytics/. 

So for those of us who are using a VISTA rule to look for these values in the UA string and when they exist and no referrer is present to use the VISTA rule to hard code and set the referrer, if Adobe can include the whatsapp.com domain in their social networks list of domains then when the referrer contains 'whatsapp.com' regardless of how it gets set then it will correctly be bucketed under Social Networks : )

@benjamingaines

So for those of us who are using a VISTA rule to look for these values in the UA string and when they exist and no referrer is present to use the VISTA rule to hard code and set the referrer, if Adobe can include the whatsapp.com domain in their social networks list of domains then when the referrer contains 'whatsapp.com' regardless of how it gets set then it will correctly be bucketed under Social Networks : )

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@kopkacobana: Ha. Fair point. Designing product around VISTA rules is not exactly a sound practice but we'll see