Channel metrics show where your content resonated whether that be via social, email, direct, or an other. 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 coming from a search engine, such as Google or Bing. Most marketers strive to increase this value.
- Paid search ads are not counted in this category. Only unpaid search listings are included.
- Organic traffic deals directly with SEO. The better you are ranking 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 all social sources such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and so on.
- Direct traffic – Visitors who clicked on links from their bookmarks/favorites, untagged links within emails, links from documents that don't include tracking variables (such as PDFs or Word documents), or who manually entered the URL of the website.
- One of the most common sources of visits to your website.
- In many cases, direct traffic can be due to internal employees logging onto your company's website. To keep the data clean, be sure to filter out internal IP addresses, so that employee traffic is not counted towards 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 that have a link to another website for visitors to follow.
- Links that have been tagged with campaign variables won't show up as [referral] unless they were tagged 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.
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