Main Website Redirects to Mobile Website, Mobile Website counts this as direct traffic, is there a way to tell what the source/medium is?

[oxfordseminars]

Hello,

The situation is that someone is arriving on my main website https://www.example.com and being redirected to http://m.example.com. When this happens my analytics says that the traffic is all direct coming to my mobile site. However, I know people clicking on my google cpc, and some google organic users are hitting the main website and being redirected. Before we didn't have as good of a redirect on our main website so I could tell organic and cpc traffic coming in, now my main website has a huge drop in these categories because they are redirecting to mobile but I can't tell on my mobile how much traffic from each is going to the mobile site.

Is there a way to fix this? Is it because my main website is https:// and mobile is a http:// (as I know that sometimes makes traffic direct) or is it a bigger problem that can't be resolved?

Thanks

[Carson-Ward]

Please tell me that you're using rel="alternate" tags for your desktop site and rel="canoncial" tags on the mobile site.

https://developers.google.com/webmasters/mobile-sites/mobile-seo/configurations/separate-urls?hl=en

If you're not, you need to implement ASAP. Make sure you're following all of the guidelines in the linked document.

Issues like this are why I typically recommend responsive sites for all but the best-staffed mega e-com sites. You need to redirect page to page - not from a category to the home page or something. You also need to make sure your canonical and alternate tags are absolutely perfect. I'd also recommending annotating the mobile site as directed above in the sitemap, especially if you've seen issues in the past.

Out of curiousity, what kind of redirects are you using? They should be 301, 302, or JavaScript redirects, because that's what Google supports. If these are done on the server side (and both versions have analytics installed) you should preserve the landing page info. Note that all redirects should redirect to the page indicated in rel="alternate" lest you give Google the wrong signal.

Read over the guidelines and let me know if you have any questions. If the guidelines are implemented correctly Google will rank your mobile site for mobile users, which will cut down on the redirects. This thread may also be helpful on how to implement redirects:

https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/analytics/KQ2RPsLR35Y

[DmitriiK]

Hi.

Tag it with GA campaign tracking. I know it will be a little weird for users to see strange parameters, but nobody pays much attention to browser address bar anyway.