Sources and channels
How the panel knows a visit came from search, from an ad or from an AI assistant, and why sometimes it does not know.
A channel is a group of sources answering the question "what did I do that put this person here". The panel computes it when the report is read, from raw columns: the referrer, the UTM tags and the click parameters.
The order of the rules
Rules are checked in order and the first match wins. The order matters more than the rules themselves, because a visit very often matches several at once.
- Affiliate traffic, recognised four ways: by an affiliate network click parameter, by a
utm_mediumfrom the affiliate list, by autm_sourcebelonging to a known network, and by the referring domain. - Click parameters of advertising systems,
gclidorfbclidfor instance, giving a paid channel. - The
utm_mediumandutm_sourcepair:cpcfrom a social network gives paid social, not paid search. - The referrer: AI assistants, search engines, social networks, email.
- A bare
utm_sourcewhen there is no referrer at all, because that is what visits from apps and newsletters look like. - Any remaining visit with a referrer, that is, a referral.
- Everything else, that is, direct traffic.
Why a visit lands in direct traffic
Direct traffic is not only someone typing the address from memory. It is also every visit where the browser passed no referrer, and there are more such situations than it seems.
- A link clicked inside a messaging app or a desktop email client.
- A move from an encrypted page to an unencrypted one.
- The referring page set a
no-referrerpolicy. - A visit from a PDF, a QR code or a bookmark.
- A visit measured by the tag for browsers without JavaScript, which by its nature knows no source.
There is one remedy and it works: tag your own campaigns with UTM parameters. Then you no longer depend on whether a browser or somebody else application feels like passing a referrer.
UTM tags
Scroll the table sideways for the remaining columns.
| Parameter | What it should hold |
|---|---|
| utm_source | The name of the place the traffic comes from: a newsletter, a service name, a partner name. |
| utm_medium | The kind of traffic: email, cpc, social, affiliate. This is what decides the channel. |
| utm_campaign | The name of the push, the same across every channel of one campaign. |
| utm_content | The creative variant or link position, when one campaign has several. |
| utm_term | The keyword, if you buy traffic on keywords. |
The panel has a tagged link builder, in the UTM tags view. It is worth using not because assembling a URL is hard, but because it keeps the spelling consistent; Newsletter and newsletter are two different rows in a report.
Why the numbers differ from your ad system
Because they count different things. An ad system counts clicks on its side, we count visits that reached your page. Between the two sit abandoned loads, bot filtering, blocking and redirects that drop the tags. A difference in the low tens of percent is normal; a difference of half usually means the tags are being lost on a redirect.