Attribution of Mozilla Accounts

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Types of Attribution
  • Service Attribution
  • Funnel Attribution (entrypoint and utm parameters)

Introduction

Users can create or login to an account through an increasingly large number of relying services and entrypoints. This article describes how we attribute authentications to their point of origin, and documents some of the most frequently trafficked entrypoints.

Types of Attribution

We can attribute accounts to the service that they sign up for, as well as the entrypoint that they use to begin the authentication flow. Each service typically has many entrypoints; sync, for example, has web-based entrypoints and browser-based entrypoints (see below).

Service Attribution

There is a variable called service that we use to (1) attribute users to the relying services of FxA that they have authenticated with and (2) attribute individual events to the services they are associated with. Except in the case of sync, service is a mapping from the oauth client_id of the relying service/product to a human readable string. Note that this mapping is currently maintained by hand, and is done after the events have been logged by the server. Currently, mapping to the human-readable service variable is only done for amplitude metrics, where it is treated as a user property. There is also a service variable in the activity_events and flow_metadata STMO tables (FxA Activity Metrics data source), however it only contains the opaque oauth client_id, not the human-readable string. A table of some of the most common oauth client_ids along with their corresponding service mapping is shown below. This is not a complete list.

Funnel Attribution (entrypoint and utm parameters)

We can also attribute users to where they began the authentication process, be it from a website or an application. Attribution is done through query parameters appended to links that point at accounts.firefox.com (which hosts the actual authentication process). These parameters are logged along with with any metrics events that the user generates during the authentication flow. The table below lists the query parameters that are currently in use, along with the values associated with some of the most common funnels. Note that only entrypoint is typically logged for flows beginning within the browser. Web-based entrypoints are listed first, followed by entrypoints that are found within the browser chrome itself.

See the Metrics for Relying Parties documentation for more implementational detail on utm/entrypoint parameters.