Acquisition channels explained

A list of referring websites answers "which sites send visitors?". Most of the time the question is broader: does search work, does the newsletter work, are the ads worth it? Channels group your sources into those questions.

The channels

• Organic search: Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Ecosia and other search engines, without ad tags.
• Paid search: search ads, recognised by their UTM tags (utm_medium=cpc and similar).
• AI assistants: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Copilot and others, when someone clicks a link in an answer.
• Organic social and paid social: social networks, with and without ad tags.
• Email: newsletters tagged with utm_medium=email, and webmail such as Gmail on the web.
• Referral: any other website that links to you.
• Direct: no referrer and no tags.

Why "direct" is bigger than it should be

Direct does not only mean typed addresses and bookmarks. Many apps do not pass on where a visitor came from: links opened from WhatsApp, Slack, Teams, desktop email programs, PDF files and some mobile apps all arrive as direct. A newsletter sent without UTM tags often ends up there too.

The fix is simple: tag the links you control. ?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=october turns an anonymous direct visit into an email visit. See Campaigns and UTM tags.

AI assistants are a channel now

When an assistant cites your page and someone clicks the link, the visit arrives with the assistant's address as the referrer. Grouping them shows a trend that a list of referrers hides among dozens of rows. They are still small for most sites, and they grow.

The same assistants also fetch your pages without anyone clicking, to answer questions or to train models. Those requests are not visits; Statsdot shows them separately under AI crawlers.

Tags win over the referrer

A campaign tag says what you meant. A newsletter link tagged as email still counts as email when it is opened in Gmail on the web, and a Google Ads click tagged cpc counts as paid search rather than organic. Without tags, the referrer decides.

Reading channels well

• Compare the same channel across periods rather than channels with each other: search and email do different jobs.
• Look at conversions per channel, not only visits. A small channel that converts well deserves more attention than its share of visits suggests. With purchase events, the dashboard shows revenue per channel.
• Watch direct after a campaign. If direct jumps the day your newsletter goes out, the newsletter links are probably untagged.

In Statsdot, channels are a tab of the Sources panel; click one to filter the whole dashboard. See Channels.