Why are shoppers from unpaid Instgram and Facebook posts being marked as direct traffic?

In order to mark a session's traffic type as referred, Propel Replays looks for the referer header in the shopper's request to your shop.

The referer header also includes the URL of the page that referred the shopper to your site.

Instagram, Facebook and other services have started stripping the referer header from requests in order to protect the privacy of their users and prevent website owners from seeing where the user is coming from.

To get around this, when linking to your website from instagram and other services, we recommend adding a utm_source=instagram parameter to your shop's URL. Your analytics apps (like Propel Replays) will then be able to pick this up and tag the user's source appropriately.