Traffic Source

Traffic source is the origin a visit is credited to, read either from the referring page the browser reports or from the campaign tags on the landing URL.

Two independent signals produce this value: the referrer header the browser sends when a link is followed, and the UTM parameters placed on the link deliberately. When both are present most tools give precedence to the UTM values because they are explicit. The reporting vocabulary has three levels, and confusing them causes most of the misreadings: source is the specific sender such as google.com or t.me, medium is the kind of link such as organic or cpc, and channel is the higher grouping that rolls those pairs together. The common error is treating Direct as a source when it is the absence of one, since app links, messengers, PDF files and browsers that strip the referrer all land in the same bucket. A large Direct share is usually lost signal and missing link tagging, not brand strength.