Acquisition

Where: /modules/marketing/acquisition — under Analytics, right after the overview.

The overview says how much traffic came; this page says where it came from: the six-channel split of sessions, the UTM campaign table, and the referrer and UTM details behind them. It reads the website and period of the context bar.

What it shows

• Channels — sessions grouped as direct / organic / social / email / referral / paid, each with its share and its change against the comparison window. Every channel is listed, even at zero. The channel is not something the tracker sends: it is a pure mapping of the session's referrer domain, utm_medium and ad click id, applied when the session is counted (see below). Beside the card, How a session gets its channel states the rules. A channel's row opens that channel's tab of the campaigns table (?campaigns.tab=<channel>, a link that can be shared).
• UTM campaigns table — one row per (source, medium, campaign) triple observed on new sessions and the channel those sessions were counted under (referrer and click id included, so a row agrees with the channels card), ranked by sessions, with its share of the period's sessions and a sessions-per-day sparkline. A triple whose sessions landed in two channels — utm_source=facebook from the app (Direct) and from facebook.com (Social) — takes two rows. "not set" is a UTM parameter the landing URL did not carry — ?utm_source=newsletter alone is a real campaign row. UTM values are trimmed, and source and medium lower-cased, so Email and email are one medium. The route searches, filters, sorts and pages every row of the period: the tabs, their counters and the footer count cover all of them. A banner above the table gives the tagged sessions and their share of all traffic.
• Missing medium — a row tagged without utm_medium is flagged, and a banner above the table counts its sessions: with no medium they classify by referrer alone, which makes them Direct when the link carried no referrer — a mail client never sends one. Adding utm_medium to the link fixes it for the sessions to come.
• No visit yet — while the website has sent no pageview, a banner over the page says so and links to the install guide.
• Top referrers / UTM contents / UTM terms — the external referrer domains counted on new sessions (all channels, not just the referral slice; link-shim and mobile hosts such as l.facebook.com or m.youtube.com count as their network), each with its share of the period's sessions, plus utm_content and utm_term, the two parameters that do not take part in the triple, as top lists.

How channels are classified

Applied in order; the first match wins:

Paid is checked first on purpose: an ad click keeps its google.com or facebook.com referrer and would otherwise read as organic or social. Email comes next, on its medium alone: a desktop mail client sends no referrer and a webmail sends its own host, so without the tag the session would read as direct or referral. A medium the mapping does not know keeps referrer semantics — referral with a referrer, direct without one.

The mapping runs when the session's rollup fires, and the channel is stored nowhere but in the campaign key of the rollup — so refining the mapping needs no migration, but it never reclassifies the past either: sessions already rolled up keep the channel they got, and only sessions counted after the change classify by the new rules. Email and the referral mediums arrived that way; days rolled up before them count those sessions as direct or referral.

Where the numbers come from

Same source as the overview — the daily rollups, never raw events — so the same caveats apply (Overview):

• A day keeps at most MAX_ENTRIES_PER_TOP_MAP (50) campaign triples; long-tail campaigns on high-cardinality days are approximate. Campaign keys rolled up before the channel joined them are left out of the table.
• Top maps are kept TOP_MAPS_RETENTION_DAYS (a year plus 90 days), long enough for a 90-day window compared with the previous year. A comparison reaching days whose maps were emptied earlier shows no change, and the channels card says why.
• Dimensions start at their ship date. Days rolled up before the campaign and channel dimensions existed contribute nothing to this page; a window overlapping that boundary undercounts campaigns, never traffic.
• Sessions carrying no UTM at all appear in the channels card (as direct, organic, social or referral) but never in the campaigns table.