Reports
Channels
The predefined traffic-source channels Otus assigns to every visit, and exactly how each one is determined.
Every visit is classified into one of a fixed set of channels — Direct, Organic Search, Paid Search, and so on. Unlike some analytics tools, you can't rename or reconfigure these: they're predefined so that "Paid Search" means the same thing on every Otus account, and so the Overview report and channel breakdown are comparable across sites.
The channel is decided once, when the event is recorded (not recalculated later), based on the page's UTM parameters, gclid, and referrer.
The channels
| Channel | How it's detected |
|---|---|
| Paid Search | utm_medium is cpc, ppc, paidsearch or paid-search — or a gclid parameter is present with no UTM at all. |
| Paid Social | utm_medium is paidsocial or paid-social. |
| Organic Social | utm_medium is social, social-organic or organic-social — or utm_source is a recognised social platform (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, X/Twitter, TikTok, Pinterest, Snapchat, Reddit, Threads, YouTube) with no paid medium set. |
utm_medium is email, e-mail or newsletter. | |
| Affiliate | utm_medium is affiliate. |
| Display | utm_medium is display, banner or cpm. |
| Organic Search | utm_medium is organic — or utm_source is a recognised search engine — or, with no UTM at all, the referrer's domain is a recognised search engine (Google, Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, Baidu, Yandex, Ecosia, Startpage). |
| AI Assistant | No UTM, no gclid, and the referrer is a known AI assistant or chat product (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, Copilot, and others). |
| Referral | No UTM, no gclid, and the referrer is any other external site. |
| Direct | No UTM, no gclid, no referrer at all (e.g. a bookmark, typed URL, or a link from an app that strips referrer information). |
| Other | UTM parameters are present but don't match any of the medium/source rules above. Rare — it means a campaign was tagged with a utm_medium/utm_source combination outside the recognised set. |
Precedence
When more than one signal is present, they're evaluated in this order:
- UTM parameters always win. If
utm_sourceorutm_mediumis set, it decides the channel — even if agclidis also present on the URL (see below). gclidwith no UTM is treated as Paid Search. This covers Google Ads' auto-tagging, which appendsgclidto the landing URL whether or not you've also added manual UTMs.- Referrer-based rules (AI Assistant, Organic Search, Referral) only apply when there's no UTM and no
gclid— a tagged campaign always takes priority over what the referrer happens to be. - Direct is the fallback when there's nothing to go on at all.
Because UTMs always win, an ad campaign that's missing or has incorrect UTM parameters can land in the wrong channel (or in Other). See UTM parameters for why tagging every campaign link matters, even when a platform auto-tags clicks for you.
Where you'll see it
The Channel dimension in the Overview report's breakdown chart and donut chart.
Related
- UTM parameters — how to tag your campaigns so they're classified correctly.
- Overview report — where channel breakdowns appear.