Channels
Your traffic sources, grouped the way you actually think about them
Referrers and UTM tags tell you the "what". Channels tell you the "so what": every visit is automatically grouped into a marketing channel, so you can see at a glance whether your growth is coming from SEO, social, email, ads or AI assistants.
How the grouping works
SimpleData classifies each visit from the referrer and the UTM parameters of its first page. An explicit utm_medium always wins — if you tag a link as cpc, it counts as Paid Search even if the referrer says otherwise. Traffic from your own domain (including subdomains) is never counted as a referral.
A visit keeps its channel
Every page someone views after arriving counts in the channel they arrived from: if they came from Google and read five pages, those are five Organic Search pageviews, not one from Google and four Direct. A visit is one visitor on one day (UTC), the same visit the bounce rate and the funnels use. If the same person comes back later that day from somewhere else (Google in the morning, your newsletter in the afternoon), the day stays in the first channel. Until November 2026 each page was classified on its own, and moving between your own pages counted as Direct; the history was recalculated with the change.
The channels
Organic Search
Unpaid visits from Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, Ecosia, Brave and other search engines.
Paid Search
Search traffic tagged as paid: utm_medium of cpc, ppc, sem or paid on a search engine.
Social
Unpaid visits from Instagram, Facebook, X, LinkedIn, Reddit, TikTok, YouTube and similar, including their mobile apps.
Paid Social
Social traffic tagged as paid: utm_medium of paid-social, or paid with a social source such as fb or ig.
Visits from webmail and email apps (Gmail, Outlook, Proton) or links tagged with utm_medium=email or a newsletter platform as the source.
AI
Visits sent by AI assistants and answer engines: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, DeepSeek and others.
Affiliate
Links tagged with utm_medium=affiliate or partner.
Display
Banner and display campaigns: utm_medium of display, banner or cpm.
Referral
Any other website that linked to you — blogs, forums, directories, newsletters without UTM tags.
Direct
Visits that started with no referrer and no campaign tag: typed URLs, bookmarks, QR codes and some apps.
Filter by channel
Click any channel to filter the whole dashboard by it: you see everything those visits did, every page, goal and purchase, not only the page they landed on. Click it again to remove the filter.
Revenue by channel
If you track purchases, revenue is credited to the channel of the visitor's first pageview (first-touch attribution, with a 24-hour lookback). That tells you which channel actually brings paying customers, not just traffic.
How to use this data
- ✓See at a glance whether your growth is organic, paid, social or referral driven
- ✓Compare channel mix before and after a campaign
- ✓Spot AI assistants sending you traffic — a channel that barely existed two years ago
- ✓Find the channel with the best conversion rate, not just the most visits
- ✓Detect UTM tagging mistakes: traffic landing in Referral that should be Paid
Tip: channels are only as good as your UTM tags. Tag every paid link with utm_medium=cpc or paid-social and the grouping takes care of itself.