Google Analytics is a powerful tool that can help you track and analyze the performance of your website. It can provide valuable insights into how people are interacting with your website, and what changes can be made to improve the user experience. However, not all sources of traffic are tracked by Google Analytics by default. In this article, we will discuss what is not considered a “source” in Google Analytics by default.
Source Types Excluded from Google Analytics
Google Analytics tracks the sources of traffic to your website, such as direct visits, organic search, social media, and paid search. However, there are some sources that are not tracked by Google Analytics by default. These include email, referral links, and direct links.
Email is not tracked by Google Analytics because it is difficult to accurately track email traffic. Referral links are not tracked because they are often redirected and can be difficult to attribute to the source. Direct links are not tracked because they are often used for internal purposes and are not visible to the public.
What Is Not a Default Source in Google Analytics?
Google Analytics does not track the following sources by default:
- Referral links
- Direct links
- Links that are not tagged
- Links from non-web sources, such as mobile apps, television ads, and radio ads
Google Analytics does not track these sources because they are difficult to accurately attribute to the source. However, you can use other tools to track these sources, such as link tagging and UTM parameters.
Google Analytics is a powerful tool to track and analyze the performance of your website. However, it does not track certain sources of traffic by default, such as email, referral links, and direct links. You can use other tools to track these sources, such as link tagging and UTM parameters. Understanding what sources are not tracked by Google Analytics can help you better understand your website’s performance and make informed decisions about how to improve it.
When it comes to monitoring website activity, knowing what is considered a source in Google Analytics by default is key to understanding the data that will be collected and analyzed. Unfortunately, there are many sources which are not considered a source in Google Analytics by default.
Some of these sources include a variety of online activities, such as clicking on advertisements, banner ads, hyperlinks on websites, and online targeted campaigns. These activities give insight into a user’s behavior on a website, but are not counted as legitimate sources.
Other sources of website activity, such as direct website visits, are also not considered as sources by Google Analytics by default. This means if a user visits a website by directly typing in its web address into the browser and not clicking on an external link, it won’t be included in the data set.
Also excluded are visits from search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Although some visits from these search engines are counted in the analytics, they are defined as organic searches and not as a source.
In addition, one important source that is not automatically tracked by Google Analytics is referral traffic. Referral traffic includes links from other websites that lead people to your website. There is a process for tracking this type of traffic in Google Analytics, however, it can be time consuming and resource intensive.
Although these are the main sources that are not included in Google Analytics by default, there are other sources as well that might not be tracked. For example, visits from mobile devices and visits using encryption can be completely undetected.
In order to gain a complete picture of website activity, it is important to be aware of what is and isn’t counted in Google Analytics by default. By understanding what is excluded, developers and analysts can concretely measure the success of their website’s traffic and uncover even more insights for conversion optimization.
