Channel
Beginner PronunciationEN/ˈtʃænəl/
A channel is the high-level bucket a visit is placed in, such as organic search or referral, derived from that visit's source and medium by a set of rules.
A channel never arrives from the browser; it is computed. The reporting vocabulary has three levels: source is the specific sender such as google.com, medium is the kind of link such as organic or cpc, and channel is the higher grouping that rolls those pairs together. Because the mapping rules differ between tools, one channel's number is not comparable across tools. The biggest misreading is treating direct as a channel with intent. Direct is the residual bucket, and any visit whose referrer was stripped, from in-app links to PDF files, ends up in it.
FAQ
Direct means the absence of a signal, not brand loyalty. Links inside messengers, PDF files, copied and pasted addresses and browsers that strip the referrer all fall into that bucket. A large direct share usually means link tagging is incomplete.