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Each visit gets one channel, decided in this order: your custom rules, AI assistants, ad click IDs, UTM tags, then the referring website. A visit with none of these is Direct.
| Channel | How it's recognised |
|---|---|
| Paid Search | gclid / gbraid / wbraid (Google Ads), msclkid (Microsoft Ads), or utm_medium=cpc |
| Organic Search | A visit from Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, Ecosia… without ad tags |
| AI Referral | ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, Claude (from referrer or utm_source) |
| Paid Social | fbclid with paid tags, ttclid, li_fat_id, or utm_medium=paid_social |
| Organic Social | Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, X, TikTok, YouTube, Reddit… without ad tags |
| utm_medium=email, newsletter tools, or webmail like mail.google.com | |
| Referral | A link from another website |
| Display | utm_medium=display, banner, cpm, programmatic |
| Affiliates | utm_medium=affiliate |
| Other | UTM tags that don't match any channel above |
| Direct | Typed address, bookmark, or an app that hides the referrer |
First touch and last touch
First touch is the visit that first found you; last touch is the visit when they sent the form. A new visit starts after 30 minutes without activity, or whenever someone arrives through a new campaign or website.
Some apps (Instagram, WhatsApp, some email apps) open links without a referrer, so those visits can look like Direct. Adding UTM tags to links you share fixes this.
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