Attributer not working intermittently

Attributer has been built to provide information on all of the leads that come through your website (not just one’s with UTM parameters) and as a result it adds marketing attribution information for people who comes from a wide variety of channels, including Organic Search, Organic Social, Referral, Direct and more.

Unfortunately though, there are scenarios in which Attributer will not be able to provide attribution information for leads. These include:

• When the lead has cookies disabled – This means we cannot store their attribution information and therefore cannot pass it through in the hidden fields.
• When the lead has Javascript disabled – This means the Attributer script cannot find the variables and replace them with the attribution data
• When the lead is actually a bot/spam lead– Bots aren’t using browsers to navigate the web, they are essentially just little crawlers that go from site to site. So if there’s no browser involved in the visit to your website, it means there isn’t any place to store the cookies or run the Javascript that passes through the data.
• When something blocks the Attributer code from loading – If the Attributer code is blocked from loading on your site, it won’t be able to provide attribution data. The most common cause of this is if you use a cookie banner on your website, have it set to block Attributer from loading until a person accepts cookies, and they don’t accept them.

In this case, Attributer won’t be able to write any information into the Channel & Landing Page fields. Depending on what form tool you use, they will either be blank or they will have the default values still in them (I.e. [channel], [channeldrilldown1], etc.)

If it’s happening less than approx. 10% of the time, then it’s probably pretty safe to say that it’s likely a combination of the above reasons.

Unfortunately, there isn’t much that can be done about these issues as they are all at the user end. Because the user is blocking cookies and/or javascript then Attributer does not have the resources it needs to function correctly for that specific user.

All other analytics tools (including Google Analytics) have the same limitations, but they are able to just drop that visitor from the numbers without you noticing. So for instance, you could get 101 visitors to your website but if one of them cannot be tracked by Google Analytics, it’ll just show that there was 100 and you wouldn’t be any the wiser.

The good news is that while you will get little bit less data, it generally doesn’t change the usefulness of the data you do get because most questions you want to ask of attribution are to do with relative numbers and not absolute numbers.

For instance, you’ll still be able to see the fact that you get 40% of your leads from Organic Search, or that Organic Search has been increasing or decreasing over the last few months.

If however you do find that majority of your leads are coming through without attribution data then it might be a symptom of a deeper problem so please reach out to our Support team below.