Campaigns and attribution
Channels and referrers
Traffic sources show how visitors found you. Stickybeak assigns each visit one channel from its landing URL and referral traffic.
Referrer tracking
Stickybeak stores only the host, without www.. Typed URLs, bookmarks, many apps and email clients, your own subdomains, payment returns and common sign-in providers have no referrer and count as Direct unless another signal labels them.
Channel priority
| Priority | Signal | Result |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Ad click ID | Google, Microsoft, TikTok, LinkedIn or X Ads; Meta also needs a paid medium |
| 2 | Affiliate code without utm_source | Affiliate |
| 3 | Paid utm_medium | Network Ads or Paid (other) |
| 4 | Email source, medium or webmail referrer | |
| 5 | Affiliate or partner medium | Affiliate |
| 6 | Known source or referrer | AI assistant, search engine or social network |
| 7 | Anything else | Campaign (other), Referral or Direct |
Campaign-tagged sources
Known groups
| Group | Examples |
|---|---|
| AI | ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, You.com, Phind, Kagi |
| Search | Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, Ecosia, Brave, Yandex, Baidu, Naver |
| Social | Facebook, Instagram, Threads, X, LinkedIn, Reddit, YouTube, TikTok, Pinterest, Hacker News, Product Hunt |
Examples
| Landing signal | Channel |
|---|---|
Referrer google.com | Google Search |
?gclid=… | Google Ads |
Referrer chatgpt.com | ChatGPT |
?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email | |
?fbclid=…&utm_medium=paid_social | Meta Ads |
?ref=jane | Affiliate |
| Unknown external host | Referral |
Click a Sources row to filter the dashboard. Revenue credit across visits is explained in Attribution models.