Learn how Google Analytics divides traffic

When analyzing website data, one of the most important points is to know how your visitors find your website and visit part of it. Channel information of traffic sources helps us to understand the behavior characteristics of visitors from different traffic sources on the website, and evaluate the quality of these traffic. If you want to gain value insight from data, it is important to correctly understand the logic of data acquisition.
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Default channel of Google Analytics
Direct:
In general, the following cases will be judged as direct source traffic by Google Analytics by default:
·Through the mail (depending on the mail provider or mail system), documents, APP directly click the link (without any mark) jump from the traffic;
·Access traffic by directly entering the URL in the address bar;
·The flow of favorites or bookmarks;
·When I jump from an http: / / website to an http: / / website, I am likely to be recorded as direct traffic;
·If the search engine is not recognized by GA, it may also be recorded as the direct source of traffic.
In GA, "source" exactly matches "direct" and "medium" exactly matches (not set) or "medium" exactly matches (none)
Organic search
·It refers to the flow of visitors from natural search (non keyword) sources in the search engine
"Media" matches "nature"
It is suggested that the setting of natural search should be carried out in "media resources - tracking information - natural search source", rather than in the channel definition.
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Search term exclusion list:
You can see the "search term exclusion list" option under the natural search source settings. Add a keyword to the list, and the user will search the keyword in the search engine and come to the website. Will not be considered as search traffic, but as direct traffic. This setting is limited to natural search traffic.
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Social:
·It refers to the traffic that comes from social media
Matching conditions: "social source referral" matches "yes" or "media" matches regular expression ^ (SOCIAL | social network | social media | SM | social network | social media), or when the media is referral, it will also be recognized as social source referral traffic by GA.
Email:
·It's traffic that jumps from a link in an email.
Matching criteria: "media" matches "email" exactly.
Affiliated Enterprises:
·It refers to the traffic from Alliance marketing.
Matching conditions: "media" matches "Affiliate"
Referral:
It refers to the traffic from other websites that are not our website.
Matching condition: "media" exactly matches "Referral".
Paid search:
Refers to traffic from paid keywords.
Matching condition: "media" matches the regular expression ^ (CPC | PPC | paidsearch) $and "ad placement network" does not exactly match "content".
Display:
It refers to the display ads that come from the re marketing activities similar to Google AdWords.
Matching conditions: "media" matches regular expression ^ (display | CPM | banner) $or "advertising network" exactly matches "content"
Custom channel
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The channels in the default channel group can meet the needs of most GA users. However, if you have specific analysis needs and want to mark your traffic in other ways, you can make the channel report more perfect by creating custom channels.
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In general, do not modify the default channel group. It is recommended to create a replica of the default channel group, and then modify it on the basis of the replica.
If the default channel group of the data view is modified, then:
·The original data of a new session can be changed permanently by changing the flow received by GA tag. After modifying the default channel group, all sessions generated will be marked according to the updated channel definition.
·The new channel definition cannot be applied to the previous data, so the historical channel grouping of traffic will not change.