How AdStrike works
Sites and organizations
Section titled “Sites and organizations”- Your organization can track several sites, each with its own tracking identifier, accepted domains, attribution window (default 30 days) and default attribution model — all configurable in the dashboard.
- Requests from domains not listed in the site’s accepted domains are rejected.
- API keys are scoped to your organization: a key only grants access to your own sites.
- Your organization has a base currency: every conversion value is converted into it (exchange rates applied at processing time), so revenue is comparable across sites and currencies.
Consent and anonymization
Section titled “Consent and anonymization”The tracker resolves consent automatically from Google Consent Mode and IAB TCF 2.0, or through the explicit setConsent API for custom banners (see Tracker → Consent). Without any signal after 5 seconds, consent is considered denied. A later denied → granted transition is handled and links the anonymous session to the identified one.
With consent
Section titled “With consent”- Cookies:
_astr_vid(visitor, ~13 months),_astr_sid(session, 30 sliding minutes),_astr_cid(id passed toidentify()). - Full events: URL, referrer, click IDs (gclid, fbclid…), IP, user-agent.
Without consent (anonymous mode)
Section titled “Without consent (anonymous mode)”No cookie is set — every cookie operation is disabled. Data is anonymized at processing time:
| Data | Treatment |
|---|---|
| Visitor identifier | Daily-rotating irreversible hash (derived from the date, domain, IP, user-agent and site identifier). Session continuity is resolved server-side within the day — two different days can never be linked |
| Click IDs | Stripped: gclid, wbraid, gbraid, dclid, fbclid, fbc, fbp, ttclid, msclkid, twclid, li_fat_id |
| URLs | Anonymized: only ref, source and utm_* query parameters are kept |
| IP | Anonymized: last octet zeroed (IPv4), truncated to the first 4 groups (IPv6) |
| User-agent | Generalized to browser-os-device (e.g. chrome-macos-desktop) — applied in both modes |
Raw HTTP headers and full browser fingerprinting data are never stored (only timezone and language are kept).
Channel taxonomy
Section titled “Channel taxonomy”Every touchpoint is classified into a canonical channel, consistently at collection time and in every report:
direct · organic search · organic social · paid search · paid social · display · email · affiliate · referral · ecommerce ads · unknown
- Raw labels are normalized (
cpc,paid_social,newsletter… map to the canon); ambiguous paid labels are disambiguated by the platform (social platforms →paid social, otherwisepaid search). - When no explicit signal exists (no click ID, no UTM), the referrer is classified: search engine → organic search, social network → organic social, webmail → email, other site → referral, none → direct. A lone
utm_sourceis never degraded to direct. - Checkout redirects never steal credit: a session (re)started from a payment gateway (PayPal, Stripe, Adyen, 3-D Secure pages…) or from your own domain is treated as the continuation of the same journey, not as a new marketing touchpoint.
Attribution
Section titled “Attribution”- Touchpoints are the visitor’s session starts within the site’s attribution window, across all their sessions — linked through the visitor cookie, and across devices through the id passed to
identify(). - Detected conversion types:
conversion,purchase,sign_up. - Available models:
| Model | Credit split |
|---|---|
| First touch | 100% to the first touchpoint |
| Last touch | 100% to the last touchpoint |
| Linear | Equal across all touchpoints |
| Time decay | Exponential decay favoring recent touchpoints (7-day half-life by default) |
| Position based | 40% first / 40% last / 20% spread across the middle (single touchpoint: 100%; no middle: 50/50) |
| Data driven | Combination of time decay and position based |
The dashboard serves the site’s default model instantly from precomputed results, and can recompute any other model on demand for comparison. Note: with single-touch models (first/last touch), the “conversion paths” view shows the credited touchpoint of each journey.
Ad platform integrations
Section titled “Ad platform integrations”Connect your ad accounts to import campaigns and real daily spend, which power ROAS and CPA in the dashboard:
| Platform | Channel |
|---|---|
| Meta | paid social |
| Google Ads | paid search |
| TikTok | paid social |
| Criteo | display |
Connections use each platform’s OAuth consent flow; you choose which ad accounts to sync.