Traffic Sources
How to Understand Your Website Traffic Sources
A plain explanation of the main traffic sources (organic, paid, direct, referral, social and email), how each one is detected and what to look for in each.
Traffic sources: know where every visit comes from
Organic search, ads, direct visits, other websites and social networks, separated and compared.
In development
The problem
Growth without a known source can't be repeated
Traffic went up. Was it the blog post, the Instagram campaign or a mention on another website? When every source is mixed together, there is no way to tell which effort is paying off.
What happens if it isn't solved
Budget goes to the wrong places
Without clear sources, teams keep paying for channels that don't bring visitors and cut the ones that do. SEO work, which takes months to show results, is often abandoned shortly before it starts to work.
How WEBPilot helps
Every visit classified by channel
WEBPilot will classify each visit by source and medium using the referring page, known search engines and social networks, ad click identifiers and UTM parameters. You will see the share of each channel and how it changes over time.
What you will see
Organic search
Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo and other search engines.
Paid traffic
Ads recognized by click identifiers and UTM medium.
Direct traffic
Typed URLs, bookmarks and visits without a referrer.
Referrals and social
Other websites and social networks, listed by domain.
UTM campaigns
Your tagged links grouped by campaign, source and medium.
Status: In development
Source classification is in development and will be part of the first data collection release.
Further reading
Website Analytics
What Is Direct Traffic in Website Analytics?
Direct traffic is not just people typing your address. Learn what really ends up in this group, why it can grow suddenly and how to make it smaller and more useful.
Digital Marketing
How to Use UTM Parameters to Track Campaigns
What each UTM parameter does, a naming convention that keeps reports clean, examples for email, social and ads, and the mistakes that break campaign tracking.
Start with your websites
Register them now and they will be ready when source tracking goes live.