Referrer filter
The Referrer filter, shown as Original referrer in the target builder, matches visitors by the website that first sent them to your site, such as google.com, instagram.com or a partner blog. The referrer is remembered (first-touch), so the visitor keeps matching on every later page and visit, wherever they come from next.
Available on: all platforms.
How it's evaluated
What's remembered
When a visitor loads a page and their browser reports a referring page on another site, Personizely saves that referrer URL for the visitor, as long as no referrer has been saved yet. Referrers longer than 255 characters are cut at 255.
What the browser reports is often less than the full link. Most sites, including Google and the major social networks, send only their address, such as https://www.google.com/, not the search or post URL.
These visits save nothing:
- Visits with no referrer: typed URLs, bookmarks, many email and messaging apps, and links from apps that hide it.
- Pages reached from your own site, meaning the same domain with or without www..
When it's overwritten
Never. Once a referrer is saved, later visits from other sites don't replace it.
It's the first external referrer recorded, which isn't always the referrer of the first visit. If the first visit had no referrer (for example a typed URL), the referrer of a later visit is saved instead.
It starts over only when Personizely sees the person as a new visitor: after they clear cookies and site data, in a private window, or on another browser or device. Visitor data is kept in a first-party cookie and browser storage; the cookie lasts 1 year by default.
Targeting the current visit's source instead
The target builder has no filter for the current page's referrer. To react to how the visitor arrived this time, tag your links with UTM or other parameters and use the Query string rule for widgets, or campaign pages with Include query for campaigns.
Options
The filter reads: Original referrer operator value.
Option | What it does | Values / default |
|---|---|---|
Operator | How the saved referrer URL is compared | contains (default), is, is not, does not contain, is empty, is not empty |
Value | The text to compare with, for example facebook.com | Required, except for is empty / is not empty |
Behavior details
- The value is a full URL. is must match exactly, including https://, www. and the trailing /. Use contains with the domain: contains facebook.com matches https://www.facebook.com/ and https://m.facebook.com/.
- Case-sensitive. Browsers report domains in lowercase, so type domains in lowercase.
- Mobile apps and short links. Visitors from Instagram or Facebook apps are often reported as instagram.com, l.instagram.com or lm.facebook.com, or with no referrer at all. Contains instagram and contains facebook cover the common forms. Tag your social links with UTMs for reliable targeting.
- Your other domains and subdomains are external. A visitor who first arrives from your blog on blog.example.com, a checkout or payment page on another domain, or another store domain of yours, gets that site saved as their referrer.
- Empty means "unknown so far". is empty matches visitors who have only ever arrived without an external referrer.
Examples
- Search visitors: Original referrer contains google., to match every Google country domain.
- Partner referrals: Original referrer contains partnerblog.com, with a popup that honors the partner's discount.
- Hide from social traffic: a group set to don't match with Original referrer contains instagram.