How do I attribute source of traffic to my site, reliably?

By Yves Junqueira

October 30, 2018

How can I reliably tell why/how someone came to my site?

Google Analytics seems useless these days for this because the referrer is always empty.

Any tips to share? I heard about UTM parameters, but that seems like a lot of work. Is there a lazier way? :-)

Or is it just a fact of life that lots of visits will be classified as "direct"?

Thanks in advance!

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my crude understanding of the options:
1. Use UTM tags for things like newsletters, blog posts, etc. https://ga-dev-tools.appspot.com/campaign-url-builder/
2. Use Google Search Console to determine what keywords people are using to hit your site. This is because Google Analytics will mark those searches from https://google.com as (unknown) or maybe direct.
patrickgordon

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8 years ago
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  Google Search Console doesn't seem to have the info I wanted, but that UTM tag editor seems handy. Thanks!
  
  Yves Junqueira
  
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  8 years ago
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    Check out https://keyword-hero.com/, may help add a bit more data to your search console results if you have a lot of organic traffic and want to figure out what keywords they are using as nearly 80-90% is usually unavailable.
    
    Logan Honeycutt 💡
    
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    8 years ago
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