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e.g. "adwords" or "open source"

# Traffic Sources

## Overview

This document covers how to customize the elements that are displayed in the Traffic Sources section of the Google Analytics reporting interface. Google Analytics tracks traffic to your website from two basic referring sources:

- organic

  Organic campaigns can come from an unpaid search engine results link, a referral from another website (such as a blog) and direct traffic.

- paid

  Paid campaigns can come from AdWords, paid search engine keywords, or paid ad campaigns from non-Adwords providers.

Once a user reaches your site from one of these sources, that user's visit is tagged with a campaign tracking cookie as coming from that source. By default, subsequent visits to your site from other sources, such as from a paid search engine link, an Adwords link, or a banner ad, will override the earlier campaign cookie information. In that case, the visit will then appear in your traffic reports as coming from a different source. However, a direct traffic visit that follows a referred visit will never override an existing campaign.

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## Campaign Tracking

In its broadest definition, campaign tracking refers to a method of identifying how users discover your site. Specifically, you use campaign tracking in Google Analytics to accurately track online advertising campaigns to your website, both from AdWords-generated campaigns as well as from other advertising sources. You can use some of the campaign tracking customizations to adjust whether subsequent ad referrals override earlier referrals to your site, either organic or paid.

Before configuring campaign tracking using the `ga.js` campaign tracking settings, you should understand how campaign tracking works in general and how you can best use it to track advertising referrals to your site. The following table lists a number of articles in the Help Center that describe campaign tracking. The rest of this section describes campaign tracking settings specific to the `ga.js` tracking code.

Article | Description
--- | ---
Understanding Campaign Tracking | A high-level summary of campaign tracking applied to five marketing dimensions.
How Campaign Tracking Works | Describes the process of campaign tracking, from setting up and parsing a link, to logging campaign data in the Analytics reporting and associating campaigns with goals in order to track user conversion.
Campaign Tracking URLs | Explains which types of URLs from referring sources need to be modified with special variables, or "tagged." Describes the most common types of fields used when constructing a URL.
URL Builder Tool | Tool you can use to automatically generate a campaign tracking URL if necessary.
Using Your Own Campaign Tracking Variables | Describes how to modify the tracking code to track your own campaign variables for `urchin.js` tracking. See the information in this section for details on how to use `ga.js` method calls to use your own campaign tracking variables with this model. This article also contains information about filters you can set if you are manually tagging your AdWords links.

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### General Campaign Features

Use these methods to control general characteristics of campaign behavior on your entire site or a set of pages.

Feature | Method | Description
--- | --- | ---
Disable Campaign Tracking | _setCampaignTrack() | Campaign tracking is enabled by default, but you can use this method to disable campaign tracking and its associated cookies for a given page or pages.
Anchors in URLs | _setAllowAnchor() | Set this method to use the # sign as a query string delimiter in campaign tracking URLs. This method allows you to get reporting data for campaign tracking parameters even if your site doesn't support query parameters. For example, if your webserver hosts static content for speed in page delivery, you will not be able to retrieve campaign tracking data using the conventional query strings. In this case, you can use the `_setAllowAnchor()` method in your tracking code, which will reconfigure campaign tracking to retrieve campaign URL strings after the anchor.
Set Campaign Timeout | _setCampaignCookieTimeout() | By default, campaigns are tracked for 6 months, so that you can determine over a 6-month period if visitors to your site convert based on a specific campaign. However, you can use this method to adjust the tracking life span for your campaigns.
Campaign Overrides | _setCampNOKey | By default, the most recent ad impression is the campaign that is credited in your conversion tracking. If you prefer to associate the first-most impressions to a conversion, use this method.

### Custom Campaign Tracking

Google Analytics automatically collects your Google AdWords data if you have linked your Adwords account to your Analytics account. If you have non-AdWords keyword links using other advertising sources, or if you want to track user clicks to your site from email campaigns or similar sources, you can create custom campaigns using the URL Builder Tool. The tables below describe the `ga.js` methods you can use to create customize campaign tracking behavior for your site. See the Campaign Tracking Reference for specific examples for these methods.

Variable Type | Method | Description
--- | --- | ---
Campaign Name | _setCampNameKey | This variable is used to define the name of your campaign, which appears in the Analytics reports on the top-level campaign report.
Campaign Source | _setCampSourceKey | The source variable is typically used to define where the campaign is originating from, such as a website name or a company. For all campaigns, or for a particular campaign, this appears as Source under the Segment pull-down in the Analytics Reports.
Campaign Medium | _setCampMediumKey | Typically used to define the type of the campaign, such as a banner ad, email campaign, or click ad. For all campaigns, or for a particular campaign, this appears as Keyword under the Segment pull-down in the Analytics Reports.
Campaign Term | _setCampTermKey | Defines the keyword terms for that ad. For all campaigns, or for a particular campaign, this appears as Keyword under the Segment pull-down in the Analytics Reports.
Campaign Content | _setCampContentKey | Typically used to set the content description for that campaign ad. For all campaigns, or for a particular campaign, this appears as Ad Content under the Segment pull-down in the Analytics Reports.

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## Search Engine Configuration

By default, Google Analytics identifies the following list of websites as search engine referrals in your reports. Referrals from search engines not in the list are listed under the Referring Sites report. This is the list of search engines, indicated in order and listed by fully-qualified domain along with each engine's query parameter.

Identification of a specific search engine occurs when search traffic comes from a fully qualified domain where any part of that domain name matches the search engine name, and that search engine uses the corresponding query parameter. For example, if you have a sub-domain on your site such as `search.example.com` which also uses the query parameter `q`, then your Search Engine reports will display traffic from the engine Search even though that traffic is part of your own sit search. To work around this, follow the instructions below on Removing a Search Engine Referrer to configure search traffic behavior correctly for your setup.

Engine | Example Domain Names | Parameter
--- | --- | ---
Daum | http://www.daum.net/ | q
Eniro | http://www.eniro.se/ | search_word
Naver | http://www.naver.com/ | query
Google | All Google Search domains (e.g. www.google.com, www.google.co.uk, etc) | q
Yahoo | http://www.yahoo.com/ | p
MSN | http://www.msn.com/ | q
Bing | http://www.bing.com/ | q
AOL | http://www.aol.com/ | query
AOL | http://www.aol.com/ | encquery
Lycos | http://www.lycos.com/ | query
Ask | http://www.ask.com/ | q
Altavista | http://www.altavista.com/ | q
Netscape | http://search.netscape.com/ | query
CNN | http://www.cnn.com/SEARCH/ | query
About | http://www.about.com/ | terms
Mamma | http://www.mamma.com/ | query
Alltheweb | http://www.alltheweb.com/ | q
Voila | http://www.voila.fr/ | rdata
Virgilio | http://search.virgilio.it/ | qs
Live | http://www.bing.com/ | q
Baidu | http://www.baidu.com/ | wd
Alice | http://www.alice.com/ | qs
Yandex | http://www.yandex.com/ | text
Najdi | http://www.najdi.org.mk/ | q
AOL | http://www.aol.com/ | q
Mama | http://www.mamma.com/ | query
Seznam | http://www.seznam.cz/ | q
Search | http://www.search.com/ | q
Wirtulana Polska | http://www.wp.pl/ | szukaj
O*NET | http://online.onetcenter.org/ | qt
Szukacz | http://www.szukacz.pl/ | q
Yam | http://www.yam.com/ | k
PCHome | http://www.pchome.com/ | q
Kvasir | http://www.kvasir.no/ | q
Sesam | http://sesam.no/ | q
Ozu | http://www.ozu.es/ | q
Terra | http://www.terra.com/ | query
Mynet | http://www.mynet.com/ | q
Ekolay | http://www.ekolay.net/ | q
Rambler | http://www.rambler.ru/ | words

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### Adding a Site as a Search Engine Referrer

Use the `_addOrganic()` method to add additional search engines to the list. When you do this, you will also specify the query term variable for that search engine, which is commonly a single character or word (such as q or query) used in the query parameter to demarcate the search string. Search engines are added to the list in the order that they are called in your script, or you can set the optional third parameter to `true` to add the engine to the beginning of the list. You can clear our the entire search engine list by using the`_clearOrganic()` method, such as if you want to start your search engine list from scratch.

### Removing a Search Engine Referrer

The Referring Sites report lists all websites that refer to your own site, whether from a search engine result or from a link on another website. In some cases, there might be sites that you administer that you want to exclude from the list of referring sites, such as a link from an affiliated or linked site. Traffic from sites that are excluded from the referrer list are counted as direct traffic instead. Use the `_addIgnoredRef()` method to remove a website from the referrer list. You can clear the excluded referrers list with the `_clearIgnoredRef()` method.

### Defining a Search Terms as Direct Traffic

When visitors reach your site by entering a search phrase into a search engine, those terms used are listed as keywords in the Keywords report. In some cases you might want to remove certain keywords or phrases from the Keywords report and have them treated instead as direct traffic. For example, a user can type your domain name `example.com` as a search phrase, and that phrase is listed as a keyword in the report. You can use the `_addIgnoredOrganic()` method to treat a keyword as direct traffic. To revert to the default behavior, use the`_clearIgnoredOrganic()` method, which will clear out your keyword ignore list and treat all search engine terms as keywords once more.

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