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Traffic sources

The "Sources" tab, in the Referrals box, divides your content into a few buckets based on where the traffic came from, which you can then filter.

Direct
Paid/Campaign
Organic
Social

Note that we can only apply "Paid" for data that is collected after July 20, 2024 (as this is when this feature launched). The "Sources" tab will _not work properly_ with imported Google Analytics data or v1 data (pre March 2021).

Here's exactly how we organize pageviews into the four buckets above, based on where each visitor came from:

Direct

We group a visitor as "Direct" if they don't have a referrer. This can happen for two reasons: the first is they typed your website directly into their browser URL bar, and the second is because the website they were on stripped the referrer before sending that visitor to your site (we cannot control this, as it's something set on the referring site).

Paid/Campaign

We group a visitor as "Paid/Campaign" if they have a UTM present from the referrer, or if they have one of the following two parameters: msclkid or gclid. These mean the visitor clicked to your site from a paid Google ad or Bing ad.

We group a visitor as "Social" if the referring source comes from: LinkedIn, Facebook, X/Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, WhatsApp, Instagram, TikTok, Quora , Discord, Pinterest or Flippa. The only reason we'd not group a visitor as "Social" if they came from a social site is if that social site stripped the referrer (which does happen, and is nothing we can control).

Mastodon intentionally does not send referrer information on outgoing links (to protect privacy), therefore we cannot track links from Mastodon, unless you use a UTM from Mastodon.

Organic

We group a visitor as "Organic" if they don't fit into the above buckets. I.e. if they came from a common search engine (Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, Baidu, Brave and Yandex) AND if the referring source doesn't have a UTM, msclkid or gclid, and is not from a social site.