Source and Medium
The two coordinates that locate any visit: the specific platform it came from, and the mechanism by which it arrived.
Analogy Mental model
A arrivals form at a station. One field records the city the traveller came from, the other records whether they came by rail, air, or road.
In practice What you actually do
This pair is the backbone of nearly every useful report. Standard organic search appears as a search engine paired with organic, while traffic from AI assistants usually shows up as the assistant's domain paired with referral, which is worth watching as a separate line.
Where people get burned Pitfalls
Capitalisation matters. Written by hand, the same medium in two cases becomes two different rows, and the report fragments into pieces nobody can add up. Enforce one spelling across the whole team.
This entry was written in English from the Chinese original, not machine-translated. Read the Chinese version →