Api.video - referrer(source/medium)

For engineers
1

Hi, I encountered a problem when started using api.video and explored their data - it looks like this

referrer
referrer1700×208 73.4 KB

They explained that they use Snowplow to populate the fields for referrer.source, referrer.medium etc. and no matter what URL I use to navigate to the page these fields are unknown.
After reading here - https://github.com/snowplow-referer-parser/referer-parser it seems that the spelling of referer vs referrer matters and as you can see on the screenshot their field is “referrer”. Could that be the problem for unknown values they told me that is the case most of the time?

2

@Georgi, I do not recognize those fields. Are they coming from some BI tool where they were renamed?

Regardless, if we are talking about Snowplow pipeline, here’s how the referrer properties are populated. The Enrich component of the pipeline has to have Referer parser enrichment enabled. The referer-parser database that is used with that enrichment has to have the records corresponding to the source in question. If the database does not contain those records, you will get “unknown”.

As far as I can see, the “default” database indeed does not have any records corresponding to “api.video”.

3

@ihor, thank you for the response. I’m new to this and trying to figure it out on the go. The fields are returned when I query api.video https://docs.api.video/reference/get_analytics-videos-videoid. For every video view you get a session and it should also give me how the session was initiated but it doesn’t. Based on your information though I’m not sure who should populate the database with values so it can handle something like this for instance - https://website/address/?utm_source=Google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=campaign_test&utm_id=18601099573
api.video or I should do that?

4

@Georgi, this is different. The UTM parameters are processed by another enrichment, namely Campaign attribution enrichment. You would have to ensure the enrichment is enabled and configured to your needs. The configuration serves as a mapping means between the URL querystring keys and the mkt_ fields of the Snowplow canonical fields. You can get more detailed explanation in this tutorial: Web traffic driven campaign tracking with Snowplow [tutorial].

5

Thank you @ihor, I will examine the topic in more detail and talk with api.video on how we can populate these fields based on the examples and guidelines.