Mark users coming to website from my application

Question

My application has some menu buttons that sends the users to my website.

I want to differentiate in the website how many users came from my app, out of all the regular users.

My app is written in C#, and currently I direct users like this:

string url = "http://mysite/somepage";
System.Diagnostics.Process.Start(url);

On the server side, I use Piwik for my web paralytics.

Any suggestions?

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Update

One good solution will be to add some parameter to the URL. Yet I was wondering if it's possible to play with the referrer field, for the sake paralytics simplicity.

Answer 1

Add something to the url, probably in the querystring that identifies that the user has originated from your application, like:

string url = "http://mysite/somepage?source=myApplication";
System.Diagnostics.Process.Start(url);

You can/could also use this to track the versions of your app that are in use by adding more to the url, for example ?source=myApplication&version=1.0.3 =)

Answer 2

Just add a parameter to the URL coming from your app, other users will not have that:

string url = "http://mysite/somepage?fromApp=v1";

On your website, you can pick that up to differentiate users. Do a redirect immediately after, so they will not bookmark the page with this URL.

Answer 3

Can't you just add some parameter to the URL your application is using and use that to filter users coming from your app?