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Categorize sessions, contacts, and customers in the sources report

Last updated: June 26, 2020

HubSpot analyzes each session on your website and applies a series of rules to determine its source. Contacts and customers in the sources report are categorized by the date of their first conversion based on the source of their first known session. When a visitor lands on your site, their page views and other activities such as clicks and events are counted as a session. New sessions begin when a visitor returns to the site after 30 minutes of inactivity or with a new session campaign. 

There are eight categories used in the sources report:

  • Organic search: non-paid sessions from recognized search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.
  • Referrals: sessions from links clicked on other websites.
  • Social media: sessions from links clicked on social media sites, like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.
  • Email marketing: sessions from tracking links in your emails. These links are automatically added to the emails you send from HubSpot. They can also be manually added using tracking URLs for external email systems.
  • Paid search: sessions from paid search ads that are either automatically identified by HubSpot or set by tracking URLs.
  • Paid social: sessions from a paid social campaign from either the HubSpot ads add-on or a paid social campaign set by tracking URLs.
  • Direct traffic: sessions on your website with no referring source or tracking URL; usually visitors who type your website URL directly into their browser.
  • Other campaigns: sessions from campaigns that are being monitored with specific tracking URL parameters other than those used for social media, email, or paid search.
  • Offline sources: this category does not apply to sessions, but contacts and customers who originate outside of your website (manual, imported, API). This will also appear as the source for contacts created by a form submission who are filtered from analytics by IP address. In the sources report, offline sources is hidden by default.

How HubSpot determines the source of a session

HubSpot uses two methods to identify the source of a session on your website:

  1. Tracking URL: a parameter that can be added to the end of a link to your website. A tracking URL might look like this:
    http://www.hubspot.com?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=xyz.
  2. Referrer: the information passed along when someone clicks on a link from another website to your website. The referrer is the original site that contained the link to your website. If someone clicks a link on cnn.com to start a session on http://www.hubspot.com, the referrer is cnn.com.

When determining the source of a session, HubSpot will honor the tracking URL first. If there is no tracking URL, HubSpot will honor the referrer. If there is no tracking URL or referrer, HubSpot will categorize the session under direct traffic.

Detailed URL and referral rules for sessions

These rules are listed in order of importance. HubSpot looks at the entire page URL (First Page Seen) and the referring domain, where noted. The following rules are then applied in order:

Order Rule Source
1 The referring domain is considered internal traffic based on the listed site domains in reports settings. Not a session. None
2

utm_medium=“social” and utm_source=the name of a recognized social network 

OR
utm_medium="social" and referring domain is a social media site

 Social media
3 utm_source OR utm_medium OR utm_campaign OR source contains the word “email” Email marketing
4

utm_medium="paid," "ppc," or "cpc" and utm_source=the name of a recognized social network

OR
utm_medium="paid," "ppc," or "cpc" and referring domain is a social media site

OR
utm_source OR utm_medium ="paidsocial"

 Paid social
5 utm_source OR utm_medium OR utm_campaign OR source contains the word “adword”, “ppc”, or “cpc” Paid search
6 gclid= parameter is present (Google click ID)  Paid search
7 utm_source OR utm_medium OR utm_campaign is present and the referring domain is google.com Paid search
8 utm_source OR utm_medium OR utm_campaign OR source is present and does not contain the words “email”, “adword”, “ppc”, or “cpc” Other campaigns
9 Referring domain is a social media site Social media
10 Referring domain is a search engine Organic search
11 Referring domain is not a social media site or search engine Referral
12 Referring domain is a mail domain or RSS reader Direct traffic
13 No referring domain or tracking URL Direct traffic

Please note: these rules are case-sensitive and may require lowercase utm parameters to be bucketed correctly.

HubSpot honors standard Google Analytics tracking parameters like:

  • utm_source
  • utm_medium
  • utm_campaign

How HubSpot determines the drill-downs for each source

  • Organic search
    • The first drill-down shows the searched keyword, which is passed by the referring search engine. If no keyword is present, but the session is identified as coming from a search engine, HubSpot will group sessions into a category called Unknown Keywords (SSL).
    • The second drill-down shows the referring search engine, such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.
  • Referrals
    • The first drill-down shows the referring domain, like hubspot.com.
    • The second drill-down shows the specific URL on the domain that referred traffic to your website, like http://www.hubspot.com/blog/blog-post-title.
  • Social media
    • The first drill-down shows the referring social site domain. The following social media networks are recognized by HubSpot:
      • Facebook
      • Twitter
      • Google+
      • LinkedIn
      • YouTube
      • Instagram
      • Tumblr
      • Pinterest
      • SlideShare
      • Digg
      • Reddit
      • StumbleUpon
      • Sphinn
      • MySpace
      • Propeller
      • Mixx
      • Fark
      • Tip'd
      • Triiibes
      • LiveJournal
      • Technorati
      • Slashdot
      • Ning
      • Orkut
      • MyBlogLog
      • Metacafe
      • Meebo
      • Squidoo
      • Wikipedia
      • Flickr
      • Slide
      • Plurk
      • BlogCatalog
      • Delicious
      • Knol
      • links.hubspot.com
      • FriendFeed
      • HootSuite
      • CoTweet
      • Seesmic
      • Quora
      • Xing
      • Vimeo
      • HackerNews
    • The second drill-down shows the specific campaign name that sent traffic to your site. Campaigns can be set using a tracking URL through the 'utm_campaign=' tracking parameter. This is done automatically by HubSpot’s social publishing tool. If no campaign is present, but the session is identified as coming from social media, HubSpot will group sessions into a category called No Campaign.
  • Email marketing
    • The first drill-down shows the campaign name of the email, which is set by using the 'utm_campaign=' tracking parameter in the links from your email. This is done automatically for emails sent from HubSpot. If no campaign is present, but the session is identified as coming from an email, HubSpot will group sessions into a category called No Campaign.
    • The second drill-down shows the name of the email, which is set by using the 'utm_content=' tracking parameter. This is done automatically for emails sent from HubSpot.
  • Paid search
    • The first drill-down shows the campaign name, which is set using the 'utm_campaign=' tracking parameter. If no campaign is present, but the session is identified as coming from paid search, HubSpot will group sessions into a category called No Campaign.
    • The second drill-down shows the keyword/term searched by the person who clicked on the paid ad. If the click came from a content network like AdSense or the keyword cannot be identified, HubSpot will group sessions into the categories Content Network (AdSense or Other) or Unknown Keywords SSL.
  • Paid social
    • The first drill-down shows the social media network from which the session originated. This is set by the 'utm_source=' parameter. The following social media networks are recognized by the tool:
      • Facebook
      • Twitter
      • Google+
      • LinkedIn
      • YouTube
      • Instagram
      • Tumblr
      • Pinterest
      • SlideShare
      • Digg
      • Reddit
      • StumbleUpon
      • Sphinn
      • MySpace
      • Propeller
      • Mixx
      • Fark
      • Tip'd
      • Triiibes
      • LiveJournal
      • Technorati
      • Slashdot
      • Ning
      • Orkut
      • MyBlogLog
      • Metacafe
      • Meebo
      • Squidoo
      • Wikipedia
      • Flickr
      • Slide
      • Plurk
      • BlogCatalog
      • Delicious
      • Knol
      • links.hubspot.com
      • FriendFeed
      • HootSuite
      • CoTweet
      • Seesmic
      • Quora
      • Xing
      • Vimeo
      • HackerNews
    • The second drill-down shows the campaign name, which is set using the 'utm_campaign=' parameter.
  • Direct traffic
    • The first drill-down will display the Entrance URL, which is the specific website your visitors typed into their browser to reach your site.
  • Other campaigns
    • The first drill-down shows the campaign name, set by the 'utm_campaign=' tracking parameter. If no campaign is present, but the session is identified as coming from other campaigns, HubSpot will group sessions into a category called No Campaign.
    • The second drill-down shows the source / medium for the campaign, set by the 'utm_source=' and 'utm_medium=' tracking parameters.
  • Offline sources
    • The first drill-down shows the method of offline import, like API, Imported, etc.
    • The second drill-down shows any additional parameters associated with the offline import.
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