How Attributer categorises visits

Attributer categorises visitors to your website into a series of ‘Channels’ that are very similar to the channels you will see in other analytics tools (like Google Analytics).

These include:

• Organic search – Non-paid visits from recognized search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.
• Referral – Visits from links clicked on other websites.
• Organic social – Visits from links clicked on social media sites, like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.
• Email marketing – Visits initiated by clicks in your email campaigns
• Paid search – Visits from paid search ads (I.e. Google Adwords)
• Paid social – Visits from paid social ads (I.e. Facebook Ads)
• Display – Visits from Display advertising campaigns you undertake around the web.
• Affiliates – Visits that were referred from your network of affiliates
• Direct traffic – Visits to your website with no referring source or tracking URL; usually visitors who type your website URL directly into their browser (though can be for other reasons)
• Other campaigns – Visits from campaigns that contain URL parameters, but are not the one’s used for social media, email, paid search, affiliates or display.

In terms of how to determine where a user comes from, Attributer looks at two things:

• UTM parameter – We first look to see whether a UTM parameter is present (I.e. http://www.attributer.io?utm_source=google&utm_medium=paidsearch&utm_campaign=attribution&utm_term=reporting).
• Referrer – If no UTM parameter is present, we then look at the referring domain (which is essentially a bit of information passed by the browser that says ‘this person’s previous page was google.com, or facebook.com, or businessinsider.com’).

In terms of the rules for categorising leads, the following table highlights them:

ORDER	RULE	SOURCE
1	utm_medium=“social” and utm_source=the name of a recognized social network OR utm_medium=”social” and the referring domain is a recognised social network	Organic social
2	If utm_medium=”email”	Email marketing
3	The “utm_source” or “utm_medium” contains “paidsocial” OR The “utm_medium” parameter contains “paid,” “ppc,” or “cpc”, and the “utm_source” parameter contains the name of a recognised social network. OR The “utm_medium” parameter contains “paid,” “ppc,” or “cpc”, and the referring domain is a recognised social network	Paid social
4	The “utm_source” or “utm_medium” contains “paidsearch” OR The “utm_source”, “utm_medium”, “utm_campaign, or “utm_source” parameter contains the word “adwords”, “ppc”, or “cpc” OR The “gclid” parameter or the ‘msclkid’ parameter is present (these are the Google Click ID and Microsoft Click ID, which get added to the URL if you have auto-tagging turned on in Google or Bing Ads) OR The “utm_source”, “utm_medium”, or “utm_campaign” parameter is present and the referring domain is a recognised search engine.	Paid search
5	If utm_medium=”display”	Display
6	If utm_medium contains ‘affiliate’ or ‘affiliates’	Affiliates
7	The “utm_source”, “utm_medium”, “utm_campaign”, or “source” is present but does not match any of the rules above.	Other campaigns
8	Referring domain is a recognised social network	Organic social
9	Referring domain is a recognised search engine	Organic search
10	Referring domain is not a recognised social media site or search engine	Referral
11	No referring domain or tracking URL	Direct

Now that you understand how Attributer categories visitors into channels, learn about what information it writes in the various Channel and Channel Drilldown fields.