What is the source of the traffic?

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Common web applications that use the data after the question mark in the URL are Google Analytics, Meta Ads, Google AdWords, YouTube, Twitter and many others.

Here's a breakdown of how it works:

Base URL : This is the primary address of the website (e.g. example.com/page).
Question mark : The question mark marks the beginning of the query string.
Parameters : These are key-value pairs that transmit specific data (e.g. ?key1=value1&key2=value2)
Here is an example of this in action, as you can see in the screenshot below, there is the base URL and then the question mark starts the URL parameters.

url in question mark

I landed on this page after searching for "wise alternatives" on Google. It appears that Verto is chinese overseas europe database running a campaign targeting this and similar searches to promote their cross-border payment services.

In this example above, the data after the question mark in the URL is used for advertising tracking purposes and appears in the advertiser's Google AdWords campaign dashboard.

With this data, they will be able to answer the following questions:


How much traffic and visibility did the campaign generate?
Which PPC campaign generated the most traffic and conversions?
What was the average time spent on the website?
Where did visitors click after visiting the page?
Another example where you will see a question mark in the URL is when filtering products on eCommerce websites, where customers can select different product variants.