Search Engine traffic attributed as Direct traffic after implementing redirecting mobile domain

[M_Nilsson]

Hello,

We recently shut down our mobile domain since our entire site is responsive now and it was no longer needed.
Doing this we followed best practices to not lose ranking and traffic from search engines, for example we:
- Made sure all our sitemaps were updated and correct, only containing the canonical www. URLs.
- Made sure all our pages have self-referencing Canonicals to the correct www. URLs.
- We implemented a DNS 301 redirect from our m. to www domain.

Now to the issue..
Search engines have still not re-indexed all our previously indexed m. urls to the www. version so we are still receiving traffic there.
Since we have a redirect, there are no issues with this for our visitors.

The problem is that, Adobe Analytics is now attributing all the mobile Search Engine traffic as direct traffic instead, which has completely ruined our ability to do any useful tracking and analysis for our SEO traffic.
We believe this is because when doing the dns redirect, no referer header is included.

Is there any other way for us to correctly attribute the mobile search engine traffic correctly to the SEO marketing channel?
Would greatly appreciate any help.

[Jennifer_Dungan · Accepted solution]

Depending on what sort of 301 redirect you are doing, you should look into forwarding the referrers in the header, so that this information is passed through to the page that is actually being tracked.

So for example:

• Google Search
• m.domain.com
  • header contains "google.com" as the referrer
• m. 301 redirects to www.
  • the referrer is not forwarded to the www. site, therefore the referrer is empty ("")

In this scenario, "google.com" was lost during the redirect, and therefore it will be treated like direct traffic

Server-side redirects can often forward header information during the redirect, so that when the user lands on the www version of the site, the referrer from m. is maintained, and the tracking on www. can see that the referrer is "google.com".

If your DevOPs team cannot achieve this, then they might be able to add the referrer as a query parameter, that you would then have to read and build into your reporting... the danger with this is, if that URL with the parameter is bookmarked, shared, or otherwise picked up by Google, you will actually be sending people directly to those URLs and reporting on them incorrectly... and that could actually last for years, instead of the possibility of some data loss over a few months while your mobile site loses SEO value and your www site gains the traffic naturally....