The Referrer Display Condition

The Referrer Display Condition allows you to display a campaign to visitors coming to your site from a specific website or a list of websites by using their domain names as an indicator.

Options

In the table below you can see which options are available to setup the Referrer Display Condition.

NameDescription
MatchSelect whether to match or not the set referrers.
Referrer URLIn this repeater field, you can type in your Referrer URLs or parts of them.

For example, you can type it like this:
https://www.wordpress.org/news
https://www.wordpress.org/news/category/releases

Or even like this:
/news
/news/category/releases

Or even a mix of them if you’d like but there’s rarely a use case for typing them mixed.

Use Case

A very common use case for the Referrer Display Condition is when you want to show a campaign for a user who is coming from an affiliate site or a social network like Facebook. For instance, if the user is somehow coming to your website from Facebook then perhaps you’d like to let him know that you also have a Facebook Page for him to like.

Troubleshooting

The referrer discovery is not always 100% accurate. It relies on the HTTP_REFERER variable which can be empty due to the following reasons.

  • Some browsers limit access to not allow HTTP_REFERER to be passed
  • The user entered the site URL in browser address bar itself.
  • The user visited the site by a browser-maintained bookmark.
  • The user visited the site as first page in the window/tab.
  • The user clicked a link in an external application.
  • The user switched from a HTTPS URL to a HTTP URL.
  • The user has security software installed (Antivirus/Firewall/Browser extension) which strips the referrer from all requests.
  • The user is behind a proxy which strips the referrer from all requests.
  • The user visited the site programmatically (like, curl) without setting the referrer header.
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