Understand Your Traffic Sources

Traffic sources, like referrers, UTM campaigns, and keywords, help you identify where your site’s traffic is coming from. In this guide, you will learn how to analyze your site’s sources of traffic.

Referrers are sites and links that are driving traffic to your site. Referrers include search engines, social media, and links from other sites.

Learn which referrers are driving the most traffic to your site by following these steps:

1. Visit your site’s dashboard.
2. Navigate to Stats on the sidebar (or Jetpack → Stats if using WP Admin).
3. Scroll to the Referrers card. Perform one of the following actions:
   • Click the site address to visit the linked site.
   • Click the “View all” link to see the full list of Referrers and download a CSV of the data.

When there are multiple referrers from the same group, like “Search Engines”, you can click the down arrow to see additional details about that referrer group.

If you consider a referrer as spam, you can remove it from your referrer stats. Follow these steps to mark a referrer as spam:

1. Visit your site’s dashboard.
2. Navigate to Stats on the sidebar (or Jetpack → Stats if using WP Admin).
3. Scroll to the Referrers card.
4. Hover over the referrer and click the warning symbol next to it.
5. Click the “Mark as Spam” link:

Some trusted sources cannot be marked as a spam referrer.

If you change your mind immediately, you can click the warning icon again to immediately undo the mark as spam option. However, you cannot undo the action once you have navigated away from the Stats page. If you have accidentally marked a referrer as spam and cannot undo the change, please contact us.

This section of the guide applies to sites with our WordPress.com Premium, Business, and Commerce plans, and the legacy Pro plan. For sites on the Free or Personal plans, upgrade your plan to access this feature.

Urchin Tracking Module (UTM) parameters are used to track the effectiveness of online marketing campaigns. You can assign a specific UTM to a campaign and track how much traffic the campaign generates.

To create a UTM parameter, follow these steps:

1. Visit your site’s dashboard.
2. Navigate to Stats on the sidebar (or Jetpack → Stats if using WP Admin).
3. Scroll to the UTM card.
4. Click the button to “Generate URL with codes using our builder.”
5. Fill out the following fields:
   • Destination URL: Enter the link to the page or post you want traffic to go to. For example, yourgroovydomain.com or yourgroovydomain.com/blog/.
   • UTM Campaign: Create a unique name for your campaign. For example, flash-sale or spring-break.
   • UTM Source: Define where the traffic originates. For example, if you’re promoting this campaign through a newsletter, the source would be newsletter.
   • UTM Medium: Define the communication channel. For example, email or social.
6. You will see the “Your URL to Share” field autopopulate based on the parameters you define. For example: yourgroovydomain.com/blog/?utm_campaign=flash-sale&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email
7. Copy the auto-generated “Your URL to Share” using the “Copy to clipboard” button and use it in your email, social, or other campaign.

Watch the video below to learn how to create your URL parameters. Slow down or speed up the video using the controls in the lower-right corner after clicking the Play button.

Search terms traffic shows the different words people used to find your site in search engines.

To review the search terms that drove traffic to your site, follow these steps:

1. Visit your site’s dashboard.
2. Navigate to Stats on the sidebar (or Jetpack → Stats if using WP Admin).
3. Scroll to the “Search terms” card.
   • Click the “View all” link to see the full list of Search terms views and download a CSV of the data.

Certain search engines, like Google, do not disclose search terms. In those cases, you may see “Unknown search terms” in your stats. For more detailed insight into search traffic, we recommend connecting to Google Search Console.

If you do not see the “Search terms” card, click on the Settings icon in the top right of the Traffic dashboard, and toggle on the Module visibility for Search terms.