Channels
Group traffic by how it arrived — Direct, Organic Search, Paid, Social, Email, and Referral.
Channels group every visit by how it arrived, so you read traffic the way you plan marketing — not as a wall of raw referrer URLs. Each session is placed in exactly one channel based on its referrer and UTM tags.
The channels
- Direct — no referrer and no campaign (typed the URL, a bookmark, an app).
- Organic Search — came from a search engine (Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo…).
- Paid — a paid
utm_medium(cpc, ppc, paid, display) or an ad click id. - Social — referred by a social network (Facebook, X, LinkedIn, Reddit…).
- Email — a
utm_mediumof email or newsletter. - Referral — any other site that linked to you.
Where to find it
Open Analytics → Sources for the full channel breakdown, or add the Channels widget to your Home dashboard. Channels are counted per session (by the page a visit started on), so the numbers line up with how many visits each channel brought.