"ref" "landing_site_ref" field has gone away

[Kevin6]

Hi All,

Has anyone noticed that when sending in a ref param it is no longer passed through to the order?

e.g. this URL: https://sfdr.myshopify.com/collections/frontpage/products/short-t-shirt?ref=SF_87 would set SF_87 as the "landing_site_ref" param in any order placed from this referral session. It was then available through the API and any webhooks.

This functionality has been working since the realease of the API, but since around the last week of July 2017 it seems to have stopped. Has anyone else noticed this?

Can I get some help in fixing this? If not, is there another way to track referrers/affiliates, etc through to the order level?

Thanks!

[Busfox]

Hi Kevin,

I've forwarded the ticket you created to our escalated support team to investigate. They should be reaching out direclty.

Cheers,

[Rick_Pernikoff]

Hi, I was relying on this in the past as well.  Trying it today however I'm noticing that the landing_site_ref is null when sent through the webhooks, but used to take the value of the ref parameter.  Please let me know what solution is reached.

Thanks!

[Kevin6]

They say they've solved it, but it's not solved. This is really urgent. Any other leads here? Does someone have a contact number for a dev lead at Shopify?

[Busfox]

Hey guys,

This should now work as expected. Simply use ?ref as a query parameter for the traffic and attribution will show in the order view, as well as in the JSON representation as landing_page_ref.

Cheers,

[Vivek9]

I tried it. Added `?ref=somevaule` at the end of the product URL and there were no query parameters before I inserted one. In the order/created webhook, for `landing_site_ref` I'm still getting null as value. Can someone please help me out?

[Liquify]

Anyone else ending up here and scratching their heads/wondering if it's working:

I'm testing this today.  It can appear that this isn't working.  But it is - in a way - but not reliably or the way it should really.  Test it in private browsing. 

Seemingly it will store the source of the first visit.

So if you visit the website first without ref=something - then it will store nothing.  Even if you visit again with another ref=something

It doesn't get overridden when you make a second order.  So kind of redundant for most purposes where we'd look to attribute to last referer.

I decided against using it in any way shape or form.  I guess you could do some stuff with the cookies in the order status page to get what you need for correct attribution (if you inspect you'll see _shopify_sa_p contains what we all need).  But I'd rather build something with ajax api on the front end for my purposes as it would be more stable/flexible.  

Hopefully this saves some time for people.

[whitecow]

Liquify

I'm seeing the exact same results.

So are we saying that it's no longer possible to track ref= correctly?

I need some way of passing data to a product page that will then show in the order also.

BusFox

Do you have any answers for us?

[Liquify]

Hey,

I couldn't in testing.  As per description above.

The way to do it would be to use the ajax api and store a cart attribute on load.

This is one demo implementation to help but ya wanna edit as required/code up your own version - not just copy and paste.

That will show in orders and you can use it on order status page.

 So something like this in the theme:

<script type="text/javascript">
 
   if(window.location.href.indexOf("source=tradedoubler") > -1) {
      //user has been referred from tradedoubler

      // so post a cart attribute with value Adservice
      jQuery.post('/cart/update.js', {"attributes": {"source": "tradedoubler"}});

    }
  
    // we'll use the cart attribute in the order confirmation page.
    
  </script>

Then on the conversion page (if required) you can access liquid object e.g. like this

{% if attributes.source  == "tradedoubler" %}
<!-- tradedoubler tracking pixel -->
<iframe src="https://tbs.tradedoubler.com/blah={{ order_number }}&orderValue={{ subtotal_price | money_without_currency | remove: "." | replace: ',', '.' | times: 0.8 | round: 2 }}&currency=DKK&tduid=&type=iframe&voucher=" frameborder="0" width="1" height="1"></iframe>
{% endif %}