Why do visits from my WhatsApp broadcast messages show up as direct traffic in analytics, and how can I tell they came from WhatsApp?

What happens when the customer taps the link

When someone moves from one website to another in a browser, the browser usually sends the address of the previous page, and analytics tools read it to find the source. Apps open links in different ways: sometimes in a built-in browser, sometimes in the phone's browser, and often without sending any previous address. The result is a visit with no known origin, and that usually goes into direct traffic, as if the customer had typed your store address by hand.

So you can broadcast to five hundred customers, watch orders rise, and then find that the report says direct went up. The numbers are right; they just have no name on them.

A link that carries its own name

UTM parameters solve this because they are part of the link, not part of what the app sends. For a weekend offer message we entered the offers page and the values whatsapp, broadcast and weekend_sale in the UTM campaign link builder, which gave this 93-character link:

https://example.com/offers?utm_source=whatsapp&utm_medium=broadcast&utm_campaign=weekend_sale

When the customer opens it from the message, your analytics reads the source whatsapp straight from the link, whether or not the app passed anything along.

Setting up your messages so the numbers help

1. Pick whatsapp as the source and spell it the same way in every message.
2. Let the medium describe the kind of send: broadcast for lists, and another value such as chat for links a support agent sends in a one-to-one conversation.
3. Change the campaign with each offer, such as weekend_sale and then national_day, so you can compare messages.
4. Copy the link and paste it into the message exactly as it is, without editing it by hand.
5. Send the message to yourself first and tap the link to check the page opens.

What tagging cannot fix

• If a customer copies the link and sends it to a friend, the friend's visit is also recorded under WhatsApp and the same campaign, because the tag travels with the link.
• If someone strips everything after the ? before opening it, the parameters are gone and the visit is direct again.
• Visits from before you started tagging cannot be relabelled.

If you want the customer to start a chat with you rather than visit the site, that is a different kind of link, which you can make with the WhatsApp link generator. And because every analytics tool lays out sources in its own way, open the sources or campaigns report in yours after the first tagged message and check that whatsapp appears there.