How a visit's channel is decided

Where a channel comes from#

Every visit reaches AdPix carrying four things: source, medium, campaign and click-id type. They are extracted at collection time from the landing URL and the referrer, and then stored.

The order of extraction is fixed: click id first, then the utm_* parameters, then the referrer, and if none of those exist the visit is direct.

The click-id parameters AdPix recognises in a landing URL are gclid, wbraid, gbraid, fbclid, msclkid, ttclid and li_fat_id.

Channel, though, is settled at none of those steps. It is computed from those four values at the moment you open the report.

The rules are ordered and the first match wins#

The ruleset is an ordered list. For each visit the rules are evaluated from lowest priority number upward, and the first rule that matches decides the channel; the rest are never tested. If nothing matches, the channel stays Unassigned.

These are the eighteen platform defaults:

Order is what produces the behaviour. That is why all the paid rules come before all the organic ones: a click from Google with medium cpc matches Paid Search and never reaches Organic Search, because rule 4 is tested before rule 12.

The paid signal#

Several rules lean on a "paid signal", and it is exactly one thing: the medium value. A medium is paid if any of these hold:

• It contains cp anywhere — which catches cpc, cpm, cpv and cpa, and because it is a contains test rather than a prefix, social-cpc and display-cpm are paid too.
• It starts with paid — paid-social, paid-video, paidsearch.
• It is exactly ppc or exactly retargeting — those two are full matches, not prefixes, so ppc-brand produces no paid signal.

The practical consequence is that a paid ad on a social network, without a paid medium, reads as organic in your reports. If your paid campaigns keep landing under Organic Social, look at the ad's destination URL; almost always utm_medium is either missing or set to something like social, which is not a paid value.

Source categories#

Rules 3 to 6 and 9 to 12 look at the source's category rather than its name. The categories are a registered list:

The match is exact, not a substring. utm_source=google falls in the search category; utm_source=google-ads does not. If your ad platform sends a different name, normalise it in your campaign tagging.

Attribution is computed on read#

This is the most important and most surprising behaviour in this part of the product: the channel is never written into the event to be read back later. Acquisition reports compile your effective ruleset into query conditions and build the channel there, every time.

Three consequences follow directly:

• Editing a rule reclassifies history instantly. No reprocessing, no queue, no waiting. Save the rule and the next report query reads years of past traffic through it.
• No data moves. The events are untouched; only their interpretation changes. So trying a rule carries no risk — if it is wrong, put it back.
• A misclassification is repaired just as fast. In one period of the product, two internal paths blanked source and medium when demoting a referral; that pair matched no rule and roughly forty percent of sessions fell into Unassigned. The fix was to widen the Direct rule to also accept an empty source — and that single change read about a million already-written rows correctly, on the spot, with no data mutation at all.

The coarse group — paid versus organic#

Besides a channel name, every rule carries a group: Paid, Organic, Owned, Earned, Direct or Unassigned. That is the rollup behind the one-click paid-versus-organic view, and like the channel itself it is computed on read.

The default split is in the Group column of the table above: the six paid channels plus Cross-network under Paid, the four organic ones under Organic, email, SMS and push under Owned, and referral, affiliate and audio under Earned.

Scopes, and who edits them today#

The data model carries four rule scopes: platform, organization, account and property. Property rules are evaluated before account rules, those before organization rules, and all of them before the platform defaults; within a scope, lower priority first.

In today's console, though, there is one editor and it is global and super-admin only: the Channel management screen, reached from Admin → Global settings → the Global data & channels card → Channel definitions (platform defaults). The screen says so itself: order matters, and changes reclassify history instantly. A rule created there is written at platform scope, so it applies to every tenant.

A business user sees the result across every acquisition report but does not open that screen. If you need a rule the defaults do not cover, raise it through support — and, as above, the correction lands across your whole history the moment it is saved.

Where you see this number, and where you do not#

Know that difference so two screens showing two numbers does not send you hunting. The acquisition reports are the reference; the others show the rough label stamped at collection, which has never seen your ruleset.

One small but frequent detail: a referral from an Android app carries a package name, not a web host. AdPix classifies those before any host matching, which is why a click out of the Gmail app counts as Email and not organic search — even though the package name looks like a Google domain.

Frequently asked questions#

Related#