Acquisition & Channels

Understand where your visitors come from across Organic Search, Direct, Referral, Social, and UTM marketing campaigns.

Acquisition & Channels (/analytics/acquisition)

The Acquisition view shows how visitors discover your website, automatically grouping incoming traffic into four primary acquisition channels and preserving clean UTM campaign parameters.

1. Channel Share Cards

Four top metric cards display the visitor count, percentage share of total traffic, period-over-period delta, and trend sparkline for each channel:

Channel Color Sources Included
Organic Search Emerald Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, Ecosia, Brave Search, Kagi, Qwant, Startpage, Baidu, Yandex.
Direct Traffic Blue Visitors typing your URL directly, using bookmarks, or arriving from native apps/email clients without a referrer header.
Referral Purple Inbound links from external blogs, documentation sites, newsletters (Substack, Medium), and partner websites.
Social / Campaign Amber Social networks and communities (X/Twitter, Reddit, LinkedIn, Hacker News, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Bluesky, Mastodon, Discord, Slack) and UTM-tagged links.

2. Acquisition Pipeline (Source → Landing Page)

The Acquisition Pipeline flow visualization connects your top inbound traffic sources and channels on the left to the specific entry pages they land on (/ , /blog, /pricing, etc.) on the right. This makes it easy to see which external channels drive visitors to your highest-value landing pages.


3. Ranked Referrers & Channel Split

Side-by-side panels provide a high-level summary of your referral ecosystem:

  • Ranked Referrers Table: Lists top referring domains with brand favicons, visitor counts, and share bars.
  • Channel Share Split: A 100-cell proportional grid and summary breakdown comparing the weight of Search, Direct, Referral, and Social traffic.

4. Detailed Referring URLs & Inbound Paths

At the bottom of the page, the Detailed Referring URLs & Inbound Paths table gives you granular attribution:

  • Domain & Full Inbound Path: Inspect the exact referring page URL or entry path (including preserved campaign parameters).
  • Channel Badge: Shows the assigned channel classification.
  • Visitors & Bounce Rate: Sort by Visitors to see your largest traffic drivers, or sort by Bounce Rate (color-coded green <30%, amber 30–45%, red >45%) to evaluate traffic quality from each source.
  • Search & Channel Filters: Filter the table by channel (All, Search, Direct, Referral, Social) or type a domain/path in the search bar.

5. UTM & Campaign Parameter Tracking

To protect visitor privacy, velo.js automatically strips sensitive query parameters (such as session tokens or user IDs) from page URLs before sending beacons, while explicitly preserving standard marketing attribution parameters:

  • utm_source
  • utm_medium
  • utm_campaign
  • utm_term
  • utm_content
  • ref

Any link tagged with these parameters (for example, https://example.com/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_campaign=fall_launch or https://example.com/?ref=producthunt) will retain those parameters in your analytics paths so you can measure campaign performance accurately.