Where do my visitors come from?

The Sources card

On a site’s Overview, the Sources card has three tabs:

• Channel: how people found you: search, social, email or typed in.
• Referrer: the websites that sent you visitors.
• Campaign: visits from your tagged links, like an ad or a newsletter.

Each row shows visitors and its share of all visitors in the range. See all opens up to 100 rows with a search box.

Channels

A channel is the kind of place a visit came from. Crustat works it out once, when the visit arrives, by checking these rules in order. The first one that fits wins.

1. Paid: the link was tagged with utm_medium set to cpc, ppc, paid or paidsocial.
2. Email: the link was tagged with utm_medium=email or newsletter, or the visit came from webmail such as Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo Mail, Proton Mail, AOL Mail or Fastmail.
3. AI: the visit came from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude or Copilot.
4. Search: the visit came from Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo Search, Ecosia, Yandex, Baidu or Brave Search.
5. Social: the visit came from X, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Reddit, YouTube, TikTok, Pinterest, Threads, Bluesky or Hacker News.
6. Referral: any other website.
7. Direct: no website and no tag.

When a tagged link has no website behind it (a link in a PDF or an app, say), Crustat reads utm_source instead. utm_source=linkedin lands in Social, utm_source=google in Search, and an unknown source in Referral.

The channel is set when the visit arrives, so it won’t change later.

Referrers

The Referrer tab names the website that sent each visit. Well-known ones get a plain name and their logo instead of an address: google.de shows as Google, t.co as X, chatgpt.com as ChatGPT, mail.google.com as Gmail. Anything else shows as its address, without www..

Only the website’s address is kept, never the full link the visitor clicked. Moving from one page to another on the same address isn’t a referrer, so that address never shows up here. If your site runs on more than one address, a move between them (from example.com to shop.example.com, say) does show the other address as a referrer.

Direct visits

Direct means the browser didn’t say where the visit came from. That’s someone typing your address, using a bookmark, or tapping a link in an app, a chat or a document that doesn’t pass it on. Some websites also hide themselves when people leave. If a link you shared shows up as Direct, tag it (see below) and it gets its own line.

Campaigns

The Campaign tab lists visits from links you tagged with UTM tags, the small labels you add to the end of a link:

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

Each row is the utm_campaign name, with “source / medium” on a second line. Crustat reads utm_source, utm_medium and utm_campaign, makes them lowercase, and keeps up to 100 characters of each. It doesn’t read utm_term or utm_content. Track campaigns with UTM tags shows how to tag your links.

Follow visitors inside your site

The Sources card shows how people reached your site. To see which page they read before a page, and which one they read after it, use the Paths tab. See See the paths visitors take.