The one dropdown that answers it
If you already have Google Analytics on your site, you can do this now.
Open Analytics and find Traffic acquisition. It sits under Reports, then Life cycle, then Acquisition, though the reliable way in is the search box at the top of the left menu, since the menus get rearranged between versions and the search box finds it either way. Type "Traffic acquisition" and click the result.
The table that opens is grouped by Session default channel group, which is a set of buckets: Organic Search, Direct, Referral and so on. It will tell you that someone arrived from another website without telling you which website, which is not much help.
That is where the dropdown comes in.
Click the small dropdown at the top of the first column, where it says "Session default channel group", and change it to Session source / medium. The buckets turn into real domain names: google.com / organic, facebook.com / social, somedirectory.co.nz / referral, each with a session count beside it.
Sorted by sessions, that list is your answer. Any site claiming to send you customers ought to be on it with a number next to it, and if it is not there then whatever it is sending you is not turning up as measurable traffic.
Use Traffic acquisition and not the User acquisition report sitting next to it. User acquisition credits the visit to wherever that person first found you, which might have been months ago. Traffic acquisition credits the click that happened.
Why a real referral sometimes shows as Direct
A genuine click goes missing several ways, so a site showing nothing has not necessarily sent you nothing. Referrals get lost:
- When the link passes through a redirect that strips the source
- When someone clicks from an email client or inside an app instead of a browser
- When the linking site is still on http while yours is on https
All of those land in Direct, in among the people who typed your address in.
So a large Direct number is not proof that word of mouth is booming. Some of it is traffic whose origin got lost on the way.
There is a newer one that does not land in Direct at all. Somebody reads an AI answer naming your business, then types your name into Google and clicks the first result. That arrives as ordinary organic search on your own name, and nothing connects it back to the answer that sent them. Agencies tracking this report branded searches climbing while the referral columns stay flat. So if more people are turning up already knowing who you are, something told them, and Search Console is where you would see it, under the queries carrying your own name.
Where you control the link, tagging fixes it. Adding something like ?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email to the end forces the link to identify itself however it travels, and Google's Campaign URL Builder will put them together for you.
Tag anything you send out yourself: your email footer, your newsletter, the website link on your Google Business Profile.
If you have no analytics at all
Two things are worth turning on this week, and both are free.
Google Analytics is the first. Most website platforms connect it with a single setting, no code involved. It shows you nothing useful for a day or two while it gathers data, so switch it on now and look later in the week.
The second is Google Search Console, which answers a different question: what people searched in order to find you, and which of your pages Google is showing. Analytics covers who sent the visitor and Search Console covers what they typed, so most businesses want both. Verifying your site in Bing Webmaster Tools does the same job for Bing, and it is worth more than Bing's market share suggests, because assistants retrieve from search indexes and not all of them use Google's. It also comes with Microsoft Clarity, a free session recorder that shows you where people scroll and what they click on pages you assumed were fine.
Your Google Business Profile has been collecting its own performance figures the whole time, without you setting anything up. It will show you how many people clicked through to your website, called you, or asked for directions.
Checking anyone who claims to send you traffic
You can now audit any claim from any site, including this one. Look for their domain in Session source / medium. If the site tags its outbound links you will see it clearly labelled. If it does not, you get the bare domain, or nothing.
Our own links are tagged, so a click from us arrives labelled top5nz / referral and you can count it. Whatever that number turns out to be for your business, you will be able to see it.
Traffic is only half of it, though. The other half is where you are placed on the pages people find you through, and that moves without warning while your analytics look unchanged. Claiming your Top5.nz listing is free and shows you your current position and score breakdown. Subscribers get twelve months of rank history alongside it, so a slide shows up as a trend instead of a surprise.