Referer parser enrichment producing "google/unknown"

For data modelers & consumers
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Referer parser enrichment is producing “google/unknown” sessions. There is also “google/search” sessions. Where does the “unknown” traffic come from? My theory is that the end user hasn’t given consent in google.com before using the search engine but I have no evidence for it.

Note that we are using Google Ads but autotagging is disabled as Snowplow can’t read it and ads are instead manually tagged as “google/cpc”. Wether the user has given cookie consent on google.com or not shouldn’t affect this tagging.

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unknown (for medium) is produced when the source is known for a referrer (e.g., Google based on the hostname) but there is no medium present.

For Google you can see a list of these unknown mediums here.

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Yeah, as @mike says this occurs when the refr_urlhost is identified as a Google domain – but it’s not actually one of their marketing channels like Search/Ads/Display.

RE: autotagging; it won’t explicitly override the mkt_medium/mkt_source fields, but the Campaign Attribution enrichment will detect the gclid parameter on autotagging click-throughs to let you see that it’s paid traffic via the mkt_network field. (gbraid and wbraid are configurable but not enabled by default) It’s not very granular so won’t help if you need campaign info etc, but if you only need “was this paid search?” then it’s a decent indicator. (mkt_clickid will contain the value if you are exporting click_view data and want to join via gclid to get those additional details)

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