Channel metrics

Channel metrics show where your content resonated, whether from social media, email, direct mail, or any other channel. In this article, you will learn the definition of every channel metric. 

To view your metrics by channel, open the Analytics view and click By Channel in the graph view. 

• Organic search – Visitors from a search engine like Google or Bing. Most marketers strive to increase this value.
  • CMP includes only unpaid search listings and does not count paid search ads in this category. 
  • Organic traffic deals directly with SEO. The better you rank for competitive keywords, the more organic traffic you will receive.
  • Websites that produce content consistently see a steady increase in organic search traffic and improved positioning in the search results.
• Social traffic – Comes from social sources such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and so on.
• Direct traffic – Visitors who clicked on links from their bookmarks or favorites, untagged links within emails, links from documents that do not include tracking variables (such as PDFs or Word documents), or who manually entered the website's URL. It is one of the most common sources of visits to your website. Direct traffic can often be due to internal employees logging onto your company's website. To keep the data clean, filter out internal IP addresses so that CMP does not count employee traffic toward traffic numbers.
• Email traffic – Views that originate from emails containing links to your website.
• Referral traffic – Visitors follow a link from one website to another. The site of origin is considered the referrer. These sites can be search engines, social media, blogs, or other websites with links to other websites for visitors to follow. Links tagged with campaign variables will not show up as [referral] unless someone tagged them with utm_medium=referral.
• Other traffic – Contains data from any medium or source that does not get categorized under the default set of channels.
• Display traffic – Involves traffic generated from display advertising, such as banner ads.
• Paid Search traffic – Involves visitors coming from a link in a paid ad in a search engine, such as Google or Bing.