Sources and campaigns

The Sources and campaigns page answers a question every site owner asks: where do my visitors come from? Some people find you through a search engine. Some click a link on another website. Some click your post on social media. Some type your address straight in. This page sorts all of them into a few clear groups, called channels, so you can see at a glance which ways of reaching people are actually working.

Think of it like asking everyone who walks into a shop, “how did you hear about us?”. One by one the answer is just a story. But when you tally them into a few buckets, a pattern appears, and you learn which sign, which flyer, and which friend’s recommendation is really bringing people in. That is what this page does for your website.

What you see

The page has two connected views: the channels view, and the campaigns view.

The channels view groups every visitor by how they arrived. The common channels are:

Search. People who found you through a search engine and clicked a result.
Social. People who came from a social media app or site, for example from a post or a profile link.
Referral. People who clicked a link to you on some other website that is not a search engine or social. Think of a blog that mentioned you, or a partner site.
Direct. People with no source attached, usually because they typed your address straight in or opened a bookmark. Direct is also where visits land when the source simply could not be read.
Email. People who clicked a link in an email you sent, such as a newsletter, when that link is tagged so leadmaps can tell.
Paid. People who arrived by clicking a paid ad, when the ad link is tagged so leadmaps can tell it apart from a free, organic visit.

For each channel you see how many visitors it brought, usually with its share of your total traffic as a percent, ranked from the biggest channel down.

The campaigns view goes one level finer. It reads the tags you add to a link (the small labels like utm_campaign that you attach to a link before you share it) and breaks your traffic down by those tags. So instead of just “Paid” as one lump, you can compare your spring sale campaign against your summer sale campaign, or see how one specific newsletter did on its own. This is also how you keep paid and organic apart, because a tagged paid link tells leadmaps it was an ad.

A “channel” is a broad bucket for how people arrive. A “campaign” is one specific tagged link or push you want to measure on its own.

How to read it

Start with channels to see the big picture, then open campaigns to study one push in detail.

Here is a worked example. Say you pick “Last 30 days” and the channels view shows:

Search: 7,000 visitors, 47 percent.
Direct: 3,500 visitors, 23 percent.
Social: 2,200 visitors, 15 percent.
Referral: 1,300 visitors, 9 percent.
Email: 600 visitors, 4 percent.
Paid: 400 visitors, 2 percent.

What does this tell you? Almost half your visitors find you through search, which is a strong, steady base that you did not have to pay for. A healthy slice come direct, meaning people already know your name. Social is doing real work. Paid is small, which is fine if you are not spending much, but it also means a paid campaign has room to grow if you choose to invest.

Now open the campaigns view to go deeper on one push. Say last month you ran two email newsletters and tagged each link. The campaigns view might show your “march-product-launch” campaign brought 900 visitors while “march-weekly-tips” brought only 150. That tells you the launch announcement pulled far harder than the regular tips, so the launch format is worth repeating. Without the tags, both would have been hidden inside one “Email” lump and you would never have known the difference.

Tag a link so the campaigns view can see it

The campaigns view is fed by tags you add to a link before you share it. You add them to the end of the link as small utm_ labels. The three most useful are:

utm_source, the specific place the link is shared, for example newsletter or twitter.
utm_medium, the broad type of channel, for example email, social, or cpc for a paid ad.
utm_campaign, the name of the push, for example spring-sale.

For example, a link in your spring sale newsletter would look like this:

https://yoursite.com/spring?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=spring-sale

You start the tags with a ?, join each label with &, and keep the values short and consistent. When someone clicks that tagged link, leadmaps reads the labels and files the visit under the right channel and campaign automatically. Use the same spelling every time (spring-sale, not Spring Sale one day and springsale the next) so a single campaign does not split into several.

Customize it

You shape the page with the controls at the top. Here is each one and when to use it.

Switch between channel grouping and campaigns. Move between the broad channels view and the detailed campaigns view. Use channels when you want the big picture of how people find you. Use campaigns when you want to compare specific tagged pushes, or separate paid from organic.
Set the date range. Use the calendar to pick the period the page covers, such as the last 7, 30, or 90 days, or a custom start and end day. Every number updates to match. Use a short range to measure a campaign you just launched, and a longer range to see your steady mix of channels once daily noise is smoothed out.
Show or hide the URL parameters. Choose whether to display the raw tag values (the utm_ labels on each link) or keep them tucked away for a cleaner view. Show them when you are checking that your links are tagged correctly, or when two campaigns look the same and you need the exact labels to tell them apart. Hide them when you just want a clean, readable list of names.
Scope to one website. If you track more than one website, narrow the page to a single site so its sources are not mixed with the others. Use this when a campaign or a referral only applies to one of your sites, or when you simply want one site’s sources on their own.

Use cases

Find which channel brings your best visitors. Open the channels view for a longer range like “Last 90 days” and read the ranking. Then pair it with your funnels or returning visitors pages to see not just which channel sends the most people, but which sends people who actually stick around or buy. Action: if a channel sends a lot of visitors who leave at once, while a smaller channel sends people who return and convert, put more effort into the quality channel rather than chasing raw numbers.
Measure a specific campaign. Tag every link in the campaign with the same utm_campaign name, then open the campaigns view after it goes out. Find your campaign by name and read how many visitors it brought. Action: if the campaign pulled far fewer visitors than you hoped, the message, the audience, or the timing may need work, so adjust one of them next time and compare the new campaign against this one.
Compare paid versus organic results. Make sure your paid ad links are tagged as paid, then look at the Paid channel next to your free channels like Search and Social. Action: if you are paying for clicks but the Paid channel sends fewer or worse visitors than your free Search traffic, your ad spend may be better used elsewhere, so test a change to the ad or shift budget and watch the channels next month.

Tips

Tag your links, or the campaigns view stays empty. Untagged links fall into broad buckets like Direct or Referral, where one campaign cannot be told from another. A minute spent tagging a link is what makes the campaigns view useful later.
Keep your tag names consistent. The same campaign typed three different ways becomes three separate rows that each look small. Pick one spelling for each source, medium, and campaign and reuse it exactly every time.
Direct is not always people typing your name. Visits also land in Direct when the source could not be read, for example from some apps or secure links. A big Direct channel is normal and is not proof that everyone knows you by name.
More visitors is not the same as better visitors. The channel that sends the most people is not always the one that sends the people who buy or come back. Read this page next to funnels and returning visitors before you decide where to spend.
A brand new site or a campaign that just went out can look empty here. Visitors have to actually arrive and, for campaigns, click your tagged links before numbers appear. An empty page on a fresh site or right after sending is expected, not a fault.