Tracking how users land on your website or app is essential for understanding campaign performance, optimizing ROI, and enhancing user experience. This is made possible through traffic source detection using UTM parameters, which help NotifyVisitors recognize, categorize, and attribute your traffic accurately.

Understanding traffic sources

A traffic source tells you where a visitor came from before landing on your website. Users arrive at your website or application through a variety of sources, such as:

• Direct: Traffic from users who type your URL directly into their browser or have bookmarked it. It may also include visits where the source is unknown or uncapturable.
• Organic Search: Traffic that arrives through unpaid search engine results (e.g., Google, Bing). This typically means users found you through SEO-optimized pages.
• Paid Search: Traffic from pay-per-click (PPC) advertising platforms like Google Ads, Facebook Ads, etc.. These visits come from users who clicked on a sponsored result.
• Display Ads: Traffic from visual ads on websites or apps, typically part of programmatic advertising networks.
• Social: Traffic that originates from unpaid posts shared on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or LinkedIn.
• Email: Traffic generated from links in email marketing campaigns.
• SMS: Visits originating from text message campaigns containing links.
• WhatsApp: Traffic from messaging campaigns sent via WhatsApp.
• Push Notifications: Visits from web or app push notifications.
• Referral: Traffic that lands on your site via external websites (e.g., blog articles, partner sites).
• Affiliate: Traffic that arrives via affiliate links or partner marketing campaigns with tracking parameters.

By understanding your traffic sources, you can evaluate which channels bring the most valuable users and optimize accordingly.

Understanding UTM parameters

NotifyVisitors identifies traffic sources using UTM parameters or automatically detects them in cases like direct and organic traffic. You can track campaigns by manually tagging your URLs with UTM parameters or by enabling auto-tagging for supported platforms.

Manual Tagging

In manual tagging, you add UTM parameters yourself to the links you share across marketing channels. This gives you full control over how the traffic source, medium, and campaign are recorded in analytics.

This is especially useful when you're sharing links via platforms that don’t support auto-tagging, or when you want custom naming conventions for better reporting.

Auto Tagging

In auto-tagging, UTM parameters or equivalent tracking identifiers are automatically appended to links by the platform sending the campaign (like Google Ads). This reduces human error and ensures consistent tracking across campaigns.

Example of Manual UTM Tagging

Let’s say you’re running a Google Ads campaign for your spring sale. You want to know how much traffic this campaign brings.

Here’s how you can manually tag your link:

https://example.com/? utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=spring_sale&utm_content=button&

utm_term=investment+plans

When a user clicks this link, NotifyVisitors captures these UTM parameters and attributes the visit to the appropriate source in your dashboard.

Here’s what each parameter means:

Manual UTM tag in Play Store link

On the web, UTMs are added as normal query params as explained above, but for Google Play you append a single referrer= parameter to the store URL containing the URL-encoded UTM fields.

Example:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.example.app&referrer=utm_source%3Dgoogle_play%26utm

_medium%3Dplay_store%26utm_campaign%3Dspring_launch%26utm_content%3Dlisting_cta

Auto-tagging in Action (with Examples)

Auto-tagging removes the manual UTM work. When a visitor lands, NotifyVisitors detects the traffic source and automatically assigns UTM values (source, medium, campaign) to their session activity.

Let’s look at how this works for various traffic types:

1. Direct Traffic  (Auto-detected)

This occurs when someone types your website URL directly into the browser or uses a saved bookmark. Since no UTM parameters are present, NotifyVisitors records this as:

• Source: Direct
• Medium: (none)
• Campaign: Direct

2. Organic Search (Auto-detected)

When a user finds your site through unpaid Google search results, UTM parameters aren’t needed. 

NotifyVisitors and GA will automatically categorize this as:

• Source: google
• Medium: organic
• Campaign: (not set)

3. Paid Search

A. Google Ads (Auto-tagging with gclid)

When running campaigns through Google Ads, you can take advantage of auto-tagging, which automatically appends a unique identifier called gclid (Google Click Identifier) to your destination URLs.

Example:

https://example.com/?gclid=123xyz

NotifyVisitors integrates with Google Analytics to decode this gclid and fill in:

• Source: google
• Medium: cpc
• Campaign: [Name from Google Ads campaign]

This means you don’t need to manually add UTM parameters for each ad.

B. Facebook Ads (Auto-tagging with fbclid)

Facebook automatically appends a unique click identifier called fbclid to ad URLs if auto-tagging is enabled.

Example:

https://example.com/?fbclid=abc123

When your NotifyVisitors account is integrated with Facebook, it can interpret the fbclid to retrieve campaign details, allowing you to track:

• Source: facebook
• Medium: cpc or social
• Campaign: [Fetched from Facebook Ads metadata

4. Social

Social traffic is any visit that comes from unpaid posts on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, X (Twitter), LinkedIn, Pinterest, Reddit, or YouTube Community.

NotifyVisitors automatically categorize this as:

• Source: platform domain (e.g., facebook, instagram, linkedin, twitter)
• Medium: social
• Campaign: (not set)

5. Display Ads 

Display ads refer to visual advertisements, such as banners or videos, placed on external websites, apps, or platforms to drive traffic to your site. Major platforms include Google Display Network (GDN) or similar networks like Microsoft Audience Network.

Google Display Network (GDN)

• Source: google or google-display-network
• Medium: display
• Campaign: [Name from Google Display Network campaign]

6. Referral Traffic (Auto-detected)

Referral traffic refers to users who arrive on your website by clicking a link from another external website, not from a search engine, direct URL, or your marketing campaigns.

When a visitor clicks a link to your site from another domain (for example, a blog post, partner website, listing directory, or news article), analytics tools like NotifyVisitors automatically record the session as referral traffic.

Example:

A user reads an article about your brand on a popular industry blog and clicks the hyperlink to visit your homepage.

Referrer Domain (external website):

https://example.com

Landing URL (your website):

https://exampleblog.com

NotifyVisitors will track this as:

• Source: example.com
• Medium: referral
• Campaign: (not set)

You can enhance tracking by manually adding UTM parameters to the landing URL (i.e., the link pointing to your website from the external source). In this case, when UTM parameters are present, they override the automatically detected referrer information.

https://exampleblog.com/?utm_source=example&utm_medium=referralcampaign&utm_campaign=blog_promo

In this case, NotifyVisitors will track the visit as:

• Source: example
• Medium: referralcampaign
• Campaign: blog_promo

Auto-tagging in NotifyVisitors Internal Campaigns

NotifyVisitors automatically appends UTM parameters to all campaign links you create within the platform, whether it’s an email, SMS, push notification, or WhatsApp campaign, ensuring precise attribution across channels. Below is a quick reference:

In UTM Campaign, NV_[Campaign Name], the [Campaign Name] will be replaced with the actual name of the campaign, like NV_blackfridaysale.

Why is this important

Whether you tag links manually or rely on auto-tagging, UTM parameters are essential to:

• Attribute traffic to the right sources and channels
• Measure campaign performance
• Optimize marketing spend and customer journeys

NotifyVisitors makes it easy to track, analyze, and act on this data from one unified dashboard, so you can confidently scale what works.