Glossary Term
What Is a Traffic Source?
Traffic-source information helps explain where an audience came from, which type of channel they used, and which campaign drove the visit.
A traffic source describes where a visit came from. Analytics tools commonly read source together with medium and campaign. Source answers where the traffic originated, such as a newsletter or Instagram. Medium identifies the channel type, such as email, social, or cpc. Campaign connects the visit to a particular marketing activity.
Example Structure
| Dimension | Example | Question answered |
|---|---|---|
| Source | Which platform? | |
| Medium | social | Which type of channel? |
| Campaign | august_launch | Which campaign? |
Information may come from platform integrations, auto-tagging, referrers, or UTM parameters. If a team shares an untagged URL through a chat app or another source that does not pass referrer data, the visit may appear as direct, unassigned, or another category under the analytics tool's rules. This does not always mean someone manually typed the URL.
Naming Practices
- Use lowercase consistently
- Define a shared source-and-medium dictionary
- Avoid variations such as
ig,Instagram, andinstagram - Keep campaign names separate from creative names
- Never include personal data
- Test parameters after redirects
- Document the link assigned to each channel
With s.id, a team can create separate short links or use UTM tags to make distribution easier to compare. Link analytics explains interaction with the URL, while website analytics describes sessions and behavior after the page loads. Use each according to its scope.