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Channel type

How each session is assigned a marketing channel such as Paid Search, Organic Social or Email, and how to add your own rules.

Channel type answers "how did this visit find us?" Every session is given one channel, such as Paid Search, Organic Social, Email or Direct, worked out from the address and referrer of its first page. Web analytics shows it as a breakdown, and you can filter or break down any insight by the session property Channel type.

What it is based on

The channel is calculated from the session's entry values:

  • the utm_source, utm_medium and utm_campaign parameters on the landing page's address;
  • the referring domain, the site the visitor came from;
  • advertising click IDs on the landing page's address: gclid and gad_source (Google Ads) and fbclid (Meta).

So that campaigns are recognised, tag the links you control with UTM parameters, for example ?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=october.

Channel type calculation

The first rule that matches decides the channel:

  1. Cross Network when the campaign contains cross-network.
  2. Paid channels when the visit looks paid: a medium such as cpc, cpm, ppc or retargeting, a medium starting with paid, or a gclid or gad_source on the address. The source, campaign and medium then pick the kind: Paid Search, Paid Social, Paid Video, Paid Shopping, Display, or Paid Unknown when nothing more specific fits.
  3. Direct when there is no referrer and no UTM source or medium.
  4. Otherwise, an unpaid channel, again picked from the source, campaign, medium and referrer: Organic Search, Organic Social, Organic Video, Organic Shopping, Email, SMS, Push, Audio, Affiliate, AI, Referral for any other referring site, or Unknown.

Sources and referrers are matched against a built-in list of known sites: for example, a visit referred by a search engine counts as Organic Search, and one from a social network as Organic Social. Campaigns whose name includes "shopping" or "video" count as shopping or video, and media such as email, social or affiliate pick the matching channel.

Add your own rules

If the built-in channels do not fit how you market, define your own in Settings → Project → Web analytics, under Custom channel type.

  1. Click Add rule.
  2. Enter the channel name to use, under Set Channel type to.
  3. Click Add condition and choose a field, an operator and a value. Fields are Referring domain, UTM Source, UTM Medium, UTM Campaign, URL, Hostname and Pathname.
  4. If a rule has several conditions, choose whether All or Any must match.
  5. Click Save custom channel type rules.

Your rules are checked in order, before the built-in calculation. The first rule that matches wins; if none match, the built-in channel is used. Rules apply to all your data, past as well as future, because the channel is worked out when you query. Changing these rules needs project admin access.

To see how a particular session was classified, use the session attribution explorer linked from the same settings section.

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