: Unexpected url parameters added by 3rd party browsers I have a static html website. And I am receiving many incoming visitor, which are adding parameters to url "?from=singlemessage&isappinstalled=0"

@Fox8124981

Unfortunately these hits are categorized under "direct" by Google Analytics, but they are, in fact, not direct visitors but social visitors.

As another has suggested, this is indeed being added by a Chinese web service: WeChat.

WeChat is a voice messaging service in China similar to WhatsApp. It's one of the most popular social networks in China today.

The various possible parameters refer to what kind of link was shared: it could have been a text link, a link with an image on a private message, a link with an image on a group, or a link with an image on the "Moments" part of WeChat, which is where people can make posts for all of their friends to read.

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@Gloria169

I know this is old, but after going through some server logs, I came across the same parameters and I was curious where they were from.

I have found

from=groupmessage,
from=timeline,
from=singlemessage,
isappinstalled=0

When Googling them, all I found are Chinese websites. This matches with other log data though. Whether the users location was china, an article about china or reading in Simplified Chinese, many times link back to China.

Eventually found MicroMessenger being referenced, which is a client of WeChat social media platform. So with a high amount of certainty I think that this messenger app appends parameters to urls for the purposes of analytics.

No bug here.

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@Pope3001725

you have no control over these so dont worry about it. based on the timeline param i am guessing facebook is placing these on outgoing links. again, dont worry about it.
if you want you can use analytics filters to ignore these params. or if can go to something like asp you could check for weird params and 302 redirect.

last bit, for seo value (if these links happen to be followed) make sure you have cananical url meta tag setup so the page without any queries is what google understands to be default.

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