Links generated from the legacy widget previously included a “channel” parameter that would indicate the social media platform or share method the link was originally shared to, then clicks on that link would be attributed to that channel.
We ultimately determined this wasn’t accurate enough to serve our purposes. Once a link is shared to the wilds, it can be shared and distributed outside of the initial platform, meaning clicks could be misattributed to a channel if a link was clicked elsewhere. Inaccurate data here has the potential to be harmful when analyzing a campaign’s data, so we removed channel tracking in the new version in favor of capturing the referer (sic) data.
The referrer data tells us the exact URL of where the person clicked the ICS link, allowing us to log that data to be used for analytics. This allows for more insights into incoming traffic and additionally lets us collect sources outside of just social media platforms, which was a further limitation of the now defunct channel tracking method.