Trip Advisor referral traffic no longer appears in Google Analytics referrers

I thought this was worth mentioning because I have a lot of great clients in the hospitality industry and this is relevant.

A short while ago Trip Advisor setup it’s servers as secure servers using https. Previously they were using https.  HTTPS is a secure method of two browsers/web servers talking to each other, you see a padlock in your browser. Until recently it was only ecommerce users that installed an SSL certificate (required for HTTPS) on their sites as it costs money and has to be setup.

The upshot of Trip Advisor doing this is that if your website server is HTTP Trip Advisor referrals will not show up in your Google Analytics referrers. The good  news is the traffic is still coming in but Google Analytics can’t read it as it’s encrypted.

As well as making your site HTTPS you will also need to login to your Trip Advisor admin area and change your website address in there to the new https:// domain name.

You can read more on the Trip Advisor site here https://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/TripAdvisorInsights/n2692/faq-recent-changes-tripadvisor-site-security

If you have any questions on this please drop me a line.

If you want to upgrade your site to SSL Certified, i.e https://yourdomain then drop me a line and I’ll give you a quote. There’s an annual fee plus a small upgrade cost so it’s not a major investment.