Insights records where every visit to your site came from — a search engine, a social network, another website, an email, an ad — and lets you compare those sources by visitors, chats and goal completions. This article explains how the source is decided, how to tag your own links with UTM parameters so each campaign shows up under its own name, and what you can do with that data.
Traffic-source tracking is part of Insights on the Advanced, Pro and Ultimate plans and works through the web chat widget (Setting Up the Web Chat Widget). There is nothing extra to install.
How the source of a visit is decided
A visit is one continuous browsing session; a new one starts after 30 minutes without activity. Its source is taken from the first page of the visit and stays with the whole visit:
- If the address of that first page carries utm_source, the visit is credited to that source — explicit tagging always wins.
- Otherwise, if the visitor came from nowhere (typed the address, a bookmark, an app that hides the referrer), the source is Direct.
- If they came from a search engine (Google, Bing, Yandex, DuckDuckGo and others), it is Search; from a social network or messenger (Facebook, Instagram, X, LinkedIn, YouTube, TikTok, Telegram and others), Social; from any other website, Referral.
The exact site that linked to you is kept separately and shown on the Referrers tab.
Because the source belongs to the visit, someone who first arrived from your newsletter and comes back the next day from Google is two visits: one credited to the newsletter, one to Search.
Tagging your links with UTM parameters
UTM parameters are labels you add to the end of a link that points to your site. They do nothing on the page itself; they only tell Insights where the click came from. Insights reads these five:
| Parameter | What it describes | Example |
|---|---|---|
utm_source | Who sent the visitor | newsletter, google, partner-blog |
utm_medium | The kind of channel | email, cpc, social |
utm_campaign | Which campaign | autumn-sale |
utm_term | The ad keyword (optional) | desk lamp |
utm_content | Which link or creative, when one campaign has several (optional) | header-banner |
A tagged link looks like this:
https://acmestore.com/sale?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=autumn-saleIf the link already has a ? in it, join the parameters with & instead. Google’s newer tags (utm_id, utm_source_platform, utm_creative_format, utm_marketing_tactic) are recorded too.
A few habits keep the reports clean:
- Stay consistent.
Newsletter,newsletterandnews-letterare three different sources. Pick lower-case names with hyphens and reuse them. - Tag only links from outside your site — emails, ads, social posts, partner sites, QR codes. Links between your own pages don’t need tags: a visit keeps the source it started with.
- Check redirects. If a short link or your site redirects and drops everything after the
?, the tags are lost before the visitor lands. Open your tagged link once and look at the address bar.
Reading the results
On the Overview tab, the Sources panel has four tabs:
- Sources — Direct, Search, Social, Referral, and each
utm_sourceyou used. - Referrers — the exact websites that sent visitors. Cmd/Ctrl-click a row to open that site.
- Campaigns — one row per
utm_campaign. - Paid — visits from ad clicks, grouped by ad platform (see below).
Click any row to filter the whole dashboard to it. With a campaign selected, the cards show that campaign’s visitors, bounce rate, Chats started, Chat conversion and Goal completions, and the other panels show which pages those visitors read and which countries they came from. The filtered view has its own web address you can bookmark or share.
Ad clicks and the Paid tab
Ad platforms add a click identifier to the address when someone clicks an ad — Google Ads adds gclid (or gbraid / wbraid), Meta adds fbclid, Microsoft Ads msclkid, TikTok ttclid, Yandex yclid, LinkedIn li_fat_id, X twclid, Reddit rdt_cid, Snapchat sccid. Insights recognises them automatically and counts the visit under that platform on the Paid tab — Google Ads, Meta Ads, Microsoft Ads, TikTok Ads, Yandex Direct, LinkedIn Ads, X Ads, Reddit Ads or Snapchat Ads.
If a click identifier is missing — auto-tagging is switched off, or a browser’s privacy mode removed it — a paid utm_medium still marks the visit as paid: cpc, ppc, paid, paid_search, paid_social, cpm, display, retargeting, remarketing or sem. The platform is then taken from utm_source (google, facebook, instagram, bing, tiktok, …); anything else is shown as Other paid. The value of a click identifier is never shown in reports — only the fact that it was there.
One visitor’s trail
On the Live tab, open a visitor to see their source in the Device & source block: a Paid label when the visit came from an ad, then the trail source › medium › campaign. The remaining parameters — the keyword, the click identifier, your own parameters — are behind +N more. The trail always belongs to the visitor’s latest visit, so a returning customer who came back through a new campaign shows the new one.
Your own parameters and full URLs
Two optional settings live on the web chat channel: open the channel’s settings, expand URLs & domains, then its Advanced settings.
- Extra URL parameters to record — if your links carry parameters of your own, such as a partner code in
refor apromocode, list their names, separated by commas (up to ten). They are then kept with the visit and appear in the visitor’s trail. Anything that looks like a credential (token,key,passwordand the like) is never recorded, even if listed. - Record the full URL (with query string) — off by default. When on, Insights also keeps the complete address each visitor was on, and a URLs tab appears in the Pages panel listing addresses such as
/en/?from=BTC&to=ETH. Useful when one page shows different content depending on its parameters — product filters, calculators, landing pages. Top pages stays parameter-free. Sensitive values (tokens, session ids, passwords) are always removed before anything is stored.
Putting campaign data to work
- Greet visitors from a campaign. A proactive message can target UTM source, UTM medium, UTM campaign or Referrer — for example, a greeting that only visitors from your
autumn-saleads see, mentioning the offer they clicked. See Proactive chat messages. - Measure what a campaign produces. Define a goal for the page that confirms an order or a sign-up, then filter by a campaign to see its completions and conversion rate. See Conversion goals.
- Know who came from your email. Links in an email campaign can carry
{{cn_id}}next to your UTM tags; Insights then shows which recipient the visit came from. See Email marketing campaigns.
Limits worth knowing
- A visit is only counted where the widget script loads. Pages without the widget are invisible to Insights, including the page a visitor lands on if the widget isn’t on it.
- The source is first-touch per visit, not per person over time. There is no multi-touch attribution model.
- Attribution by click identifier and the Paid tab cover visits recorded since late September 2026; older visits keep their five UTM values but no paid platform.