What the channel names mean

The kind of traffic a visit or lead is, such as Paid Search, Organic Search, Direct or Referral, worked out from how the person arrived at your site. Every pageview and every lead is given one channel, worked out from four things the visit carried: the source, the medium, any advertising click identifier, and the site that referred the visitor. A source is a different thing. Source: The site or platform the visit came from, such as Google, Facebook or Yelp, or Direct when the person typed your address or used a bookmark. The Channel tab under Traffic Sources counts visitors per channel, and Cost per lead and ROAS uses the three paid ones.

The channels

• SMS: the medium says sms, mms or text, or the source is a text message.
• Email: the medium says email or newsletter, or the source is an email tool such as Klaviyo, Mailchimp or SendGrid.
• AI Assistant: an AI assistant sent the visitor (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, Grok, DeepSeek, Mistral and Poe) and the visit was not paid.
• Paid Search: a search engine sent the visitor and the visit was paid. A paid click that came through Google or YouTube lands here even when the site itself is a video or shopping site.
• Organic Search: a search engine (Google, Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo and others) sent the visitor with no paid marker.
• Paid Social: a social network sent the visitor and the visit was paid.
• Organic Social: a social network (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, Nextdoor, Reddit and others) sent the visitor with no paid marker.
• Video: YouTube, Vimeo or another video site sent the visitor, not paid.
• Shopping: Amazon, Etsy or another marketplace sent the visitor, not paid.
• Affiliates: the medium says affiliate.
• Paid Other: a paid visit that none of the paid channels above claims, including paid clicks from AI assistants, video and shopping sites that did not come through Google.
• Phone: a call with no website visit behind it: no referring site, and a source or medium that only says phone or call.
• Chat: a chat with no referring site and nothing but chat to go on.
• Direct: no source and no referring site at all.
• Referral: everything else: a referring site, or a source that fits none of the categories above.

The list is in the order the rules are tried, so a visit that fits two descriptions takes the first: a text-message or email medium is decided before anything else, then the platform the visitor came from settles paid or organic, and Direct and Referral come last.

What makes a visit paid

A visit is paid when any of three things is true: its medium is one of cpc, ppc, paid, paidsearch, paid-search, display, cpm, banner or retargeting; it carries a click identifier from Google, Meta or Microsoft ads; or its source is spelled google ads, googleads, adwords, bing ads, microsoft ads or facebook ads. Tag your ad links with one of those mediums and they always land in a paid channel.

Phone and Chat are used only as a last resort. A call or chat that arrived with a known source or a referring site keeps that attribution, because it says where the customer came from; how they contacted you is recorded separately on the lead.

The AI tab

The AI tab under Traffic Sources names the assistant: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, Grok, DeepSeek, Mistral and Poe, or Other AI for one it cannot name, with the visitors each sent and the leads among them.