How to accurately track the source of website access, especially the sharing links of apps such as WeChat?

Website visit source tracking: efficient method, accurate identification of WeChat and other applications

Accurately tracking the source of website access is crucial for data analysis, and the limitations of the document.referrer attribute make it difficult to track the source of links to apps such as WeChat. This article will explore more accurate tracking methods.

We first analyze the User-Agent field in the HTTP request header. This field contains access to device and browser information. For example, WeChat’s built-in browser will include the MicroMessenger field in User-Agent . The following example compares User-Agent of the built-in browser of iPhone WeChat and Safari browser:

Built-in browser for WeChat:

 <code>GET / HTTP/1.1 Host: 172.16.111.194:10000 Upgrade-Insecure-Requests: 1 Accept: text/html,application/xhtml xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8 User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 16_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile/15E148 MicroMessenger/8.0.29(0x18001d36) NetType/WIFI Language/zh_CN Accept-Language: zh-CN,zh-Hans;q=0.9 Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate Connection: keep-alive</code>

Safari browser:

 <code>GET / HTTP/1.1 Host: 172.16.111.194:10000 Upgrade-Insecure-Requests: 1 Accept: text/html,application/xhtml xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8 User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 16_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/16.1 Mobile/15E148 Safari/604.1 Accept-Language: zh-CN,zh-Hans;q=0.9 Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate Connection: keep-alive</code>

However, if the user chooses to open the link using the system default browser, User-Agent will not accurately reflect the source.

A more reliable method is to add a unique dynamic ID to the URL when generating a sharing link, and establish a mapping relationship between the ID and the source on the server side. Through this ID, the server can accurately identify the access source and control access to specific sources.

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