What are Traffic Sources?

Traffic sources are the channels through which visitors arrive on a website. Insight into your traffic sources shows which marketing channels actually deliver visitors and how much attribution each channel deserves.

The main traffic sources

Organic search: visitors from unpaid search results in Google or Bing. Paid search: visitors from SEA ads. Direct: visitors who type in the URL directly or come through a bookmark. Referral: visitors through links on other websites (backlinks). Social: visitors through social media. Email: visitors through email campaigns.

Analysing traffic sources in GA4

In GA4 you find your traffic sources under Acquisition. Use UTM tags consistently to attribute paid traffic, email and social media accurately. Without UTM tags, a lot of campaign traffic is classified as direct.

Traffic sources and budget allocation

By seeing which source delivers the highest conversion rate and the lowest CPA, you can divide your budget across channels more intelligently.

What is the biggest difference between organic and direct traffic?

Organic traffic comes from a search engine, and you can see the search queries behind it in Google Search Console (GA4 itself does not show organic keywords). Direct traffic has no known source and also includes traffic from untagged campaigns and apps.

Why is my direct traffic so high?

Possibly because of missing UTM tags on your campaigns. More at developers.google.com/search.