Finding first referrer?

[Ajay]

When our customers sign up for our extension, they go through a Google authentication process.  Therefore, almost all of the full referrers for the 'install' event we send show up as:

accounts.google.com/o/oauth2/auth

Is there any way to tie these events back to the very first referrer?  i.e. If users come from a CNN.com article, and then install, the install event should show cnn.com as the referral path or full referrer instead of accounts.google.com/o/oauth2/auth

Any thoughts?  Thanks a lot for the insight.

[Samy]

Hi Ajay

First add an ignore ref for this link.

This should work right away.

If by any chance it doesn't work, you could get it to pass as a parameter in the URL and pass it as ref to ga.

Thanks
Sam

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[Ajay]

Thanks a lot for the quick reply, Samrat!  Really appreciate it.  I've added it to the Referral Exclusion List following the instructions here (https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2795830?hl=en&ref_topic=2790009) and will check back tomorrow when there's more traffic (it didn't seem to apply right away).

How would I go about passing it in as a parameter in the URL?  If you'd be so kind, could you point me to an example?

Thanks again!

Ajay

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[Ajay]

Reporting back after collecting some more data.

Most of the full referrers now show up as (direct) instead of the actual first referrer.  Any idea on how to fix this?  The same GA profile is set on both of our marketing site and our app site (even though they have different subdomains - one is www. and the other is app.).  Could this be the issue?  

Here's a recap of the flow:

User reads article on CNN.com

User clicks link to come to www.mysite.com

User clicks install button

User installs chrome extension and gets redirected to gmail

User presses Activate button for extension

User authenticates with Google and is redirected back to app site

Upon success, user sees a page in app.mysite.com 

App site triggers event A when page is shown

When looking at google analytics for event A, I want to see that CNN.com is the referrer.  However, since that callback happens from authentication, I think (direct) is taking placing instead.  Thoughts?

[Mark Schenkel]

Did you ever get a resolution?  I am in the same situation but everything is on a single domain (i.e. "www.mysite.com").  I have a "web service" that authenticates for Google Analytics API.  After putting accounts.google.com in the Exclusion List the traffic in turn changes to "direct".