Referrals aren't tracked across pages?

Help
1

New to Simple Analytics. If a user clicks a link with a ?ref=example, I see that show up in UTM Sources for that pageview.

But if they go and visit a new page on my site, it doesn’t seem to carry forward. Is this true?

I want to be able to track a signup event with metadata of their referral source, but it’s moot if the user can view another page and THEN sign up, since it seems like it won’t be captured.

Am I missing anything or is this expected behavior?

P.S. unrelated question, why do ?ref=example show up in the UTM source section and not the Referrals section like the name suggests?

2

We don’t track visitors, this means that data from a page back is lost on the next page. The only thing that caries forward is the path and hostname of the previous page (as referrer hostname and path). You can use those in our goals feature.

Regarding naming, showing ref in referrals makes sense. However, what do you do with ?via= (another way we might support later). Since the start, we saw ref as short for UTM source, but your reasoning makes a lot of sense. Will look into that.