Getting Specific: How did they find our site?

Jenny wonders: When people came to our site, did they type in our URL or click on a bookmark? Or did they come through a search engine or from social media? 


1. In the left-hand navigation, Jenny clicks on Acquisition > Overview.
This describes the different “channels” that people used to get to the site. It includes channels like the following:
ORGANIC SEARCH: Sessions that came from search engines such as Google, Yahoo or Bing. Organic search traffic doesn’t include sessions that come from paid search ads. 

DIRECT: Sessions from people who typed in a URL, clicked on a bookmark, or copied and pasted a URL in a browser. 

SOCIAL: Sessions from links in a social network such as Facebook or Twitter. This channel includes all traffic from social networks, not just traffic from the news organization’s social network accounts.

REFERRAL: Sessions from links from another site such as the Huffington Post, Wikipedia or any other site that’s not a search engine or a social network. 

Others could include channels customized by a news organization such as EMAIL and paid search advertising. 
The Norman Lear Center's Media Impact Project researches how entertainment and news influence our thoughts, attitudes, beliefs, knowledge and actions. We work with researchers, the film and TV industry, nonprofits, and news organizations, and share our research with the public. We are part of the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.