Referrer vs Sign-Up URL Showing the Same Value: Is This Expected?

Hi everyone,

I’m currently testing tracking inside my forms and I’ve run into something that doesn’t quite add up.

In my Fluent Forms setup, I’m capturing both:

• Referrer URL (e.g. Google, external site)
• Sign-up URL (e.g. the landing page where the form lives)

This data is being stored via the integration with FluentCRM, and I’m not using any hidden fields inside Fluent Forms to capture this information manually.

My assumption is that this shouldn’t be necessary, since the integration already provides these values: but happy to be corrected if that’s not the case.

The issue

After multiple tests across different user journeys (coming from Google, internal pages, direct visits, etc.), I’m consistently seeing that both values often match.

This feels counterintuitive, since:

• The referrer should represent the previous source (e.g. Google or another page)
• The sign-up URL should represent the actual page where the form is submitted

So in theory, these should differ in many cases — but they don’t.

What I’ve tested

• Different entry points (Google, direct, internal navigation)
• Multi-step journeys across pages
• Fresh sessions / incognito

Still seeing the same behavior.

My hypothesis

It might be related to how browsers handle referrer policies, caching, or how the plugin retrieves the value, but I’m not fully sure.

Related idea (feature request context)

I previously suggested that, since FluentCart already tracks UTMs and attribution quite well, it could be very powerful to bring similar tracking capabilities into Fluent Forms:

👉 https://community.wpmanageninja.com/portal/space/fluent-forms/post/utm-tracking

This could solve attribution much more reliably than relying on basic referrer logic.

Questions

• Is this expected behavior with referrer tracking in Fluent Forms?
• Has anyone successfully differentiated referrer vs sign-up URL consistently?
• Do I actually need to implement hidden fields to capture this properly, or should the current integration with FluentCRM already handle it?
• Are you using any workaround (UTMs, hidden fields, scripts, etc.)?

Would love to hear how others are handling attribution on forms.

Thanks!