The channels
A visit is classified into one channel, such as:Direct · Organic Search · Paid Search · Organic Social · Paid Social · Referral · Email · AI · Display · Affiliate · Internal · Unknown
How the channel is decided
Classification reads three inputs and applies them in a fixed order:- Campaign parameters —
utm_source,utm_medium,utm_campaign, and ad click IDs (gclid,gad_source) take priority when present. They’re how a link tells tinyanalytics exactly which channel it belongs to. - Referrer — when there are no campaign parameters, the referring domain decides the channel: a search engine means Organic Search, a social network means Organic Social, and so on.
- No referrer — a visit with no referrer and no campaign parameters is Direct.
- Paid beats organic — a visit from a search source with a paid signal (an ad medium or a click ID) is Paid Search, not Organic Search.
- AI is checked before search — a visit from an AI assistant’s domain is classified as AI rather than being mistaken for a search engine.
A visit from one of your own pages to another is labeled Internal, not counted as a new external referral — so on-site navigation doesn’t pollute your acquisition data.
How are visits between my own subdomains classified?
Hops between your root domain and any of its subdomains are Internal, in both directions —example.com to app.example.com and app.example.com back to example.com. The visitor stays in one session and no referral is recorded.
Sibling subdomains are the exception. A hop from app.example.com to blog.example.com is still classified as a Referral, because neither domain contains the other. To fold those into your direct traffic, add your root domain to Referrer Exclusions — see exclude traffic.
An excluded referrer is reported as Direct, not Internal. The two labels mean different things: Internal marks navigation inside your own site, while Direct means tinyanalytics has no referrer to attribute the visit to. Campaign parameters still take priority over both — a UTM-tagged link from an excluded referrer keeps its campaign channel.
Tag your own links
To classify your campaigns precisely, add UTM parameters to the links you control — for example?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email. tinyanalytics reads them and files the visit under the right channel, and you can break any report down by source, medium, or campaign.
Related
AI traffic
Visits that arrive from AI assistants.
Shortlinks
Trackable links that carry campaign tags.
Dashboard overview
See your traffic by channel.
How bot detection works
How non-human traffic is filtered first.