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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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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