What Are Google Analytics Channels? Source and Medium Explained

1. What is Channels in Google Analytics?

Google Analytics provides many reports on Acquisition through which you can understand traffic acquisition (i.e. how you are acquiring users for your website). However, in order to understand the various Acquisition reports and the users acquisition in general, you would need to first understand what channels are and how they are defined in Google Analytics.

The top channels of traffic, tracked by Google Analytics:

1. Organic: People who click to your website in search engine are organic visit and land on your website. Indicates visits from organic (unpaid) search results.
2. Paid: People who click to your website shown on PPC ads in SERP.  Indicates traffic from PPC campaigns run in search results.
3. Display: Indicates traffic from display advertising, such as Google AdWords remarketing campaigns.
4. Direct: People who write down your website domain on URL bar on the browser and visit your website. In general, indicates visits where users navigated directly to the URL or the source of the visit is unknown.
5. Referral: People who come to your site from other sites like Quora.com, Reddit.com, etc. Indicates traffic where users clicked a link from another site, excluding major search engines.
6. Social: People visiting your site using Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. Indicates visits from social networks (Facebook, Twitter, etc.)
7. Email: Indicates traffic from links clicked in email messages, whether mass email marketing
8. Other Advertising: Indicates traffic from online advertising outside of search and display, such as cost-per-view video advertising.

In order to understand channels, you would first need to know about various traffic sources, medium.

2. What is Source in Google Analytics?

Source (or traffic source) is the origin of your website traffic. It is the website from which people visited your website.

• If people visited your website from Google.com then your website traffic source is google.
• If people visited your website from facebook.com then your website traffic source is facebook.

For example, if a person clicks on the following link which takes him to The Monkey Owl website:

https://www.themonkeyowl.com/book-digital-marketing/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=pdf-book-campaign&utm_content=ad1

Then Google Analytics will report ‘facebook’ as your website traffic source. This is because the value of the utm_source parameter has been set to ‘facebook’.

3. What is Medium in Google Analytics?

Medium (or traffic medium) is the category of the traffic source as defined by Google Analytics.

For example, if a person clicks on the following link which takes him to The Monkey Owl website:

https://www.themonkeyowl.com/book-digital-marketing/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=pdf-book-campaign&utm_content=ad1

Then Google Analytics will report ‘social’ as your website traffic medium. This is because the value of the utm_medium parameter has been set to ‘social’.