Channels & UTM Classification

Every visit Zenovay records is sorted into a channel: a short label that answers "where did this visitor come from?" Channels are what power the Sources breakdown, so getting them right is mostly a matter of tagging your links consistently. This page explains the channels, the exact order Zenovay uses to pick one, the UTM conventions that keep your reports clean, and the edge cases that trip people up.

The channels

How Zenovay picks a channel

Zenovay checks a series of signals in priority order and stops at the first one that matches. All text matching is case-insensitive.

Step 2: utm_medium keywords

If a utm_medium is present, Zenovay looks for these keywords inside the value (a substring match, so paid-social matches paid):

Step 3: utm_source fallback

utm_source is only consulted when there is no utm_medium. The source is matched against curated platform lists:

Recommended UTM conventions

Tag your links with these conventions and traffic lands in the channel you expect. Keep every value lowercase and consistent.

Edge cases

These are the real gotchas, each with the exact behavior.

• "paid-social" and similar count as Paid, not Social. Any utm_medium that contains the text paid matches the Paid rule, and Paid is checked before Social. Use utm_medium=social for organic posts, and accept that paid social lands in Paid (which is usually what you want for ad reporting).
• An ad click ID beats every UTM. If a link carries gclid, fbclid, ttclid, msclkid, or another known ad click ID (wbraid, gbraid, twclid, li_fat_id, dclid, yclid, epik), the visit is Paid even if you also set utm_medium=email. Do not append ad click IDs to newsletter links.
• An unknown utm_medium becomes Referral. A tagged visit is never Direct. If you invent a medium like partner, qr, or sms, it lands in Referral rather than a channel of its own.
• Missing utm_source with a utm_medium set: the medium decides. utm_medium=email alone gives Email, utm_medium=cpc alone gives Paid, and utm_medium=anything-else alone gives Referral.
• Missing utm_medium with a utm_source set: the source decides, matched against the known ad, social, and email platform lists. Unrecognized sources become Referral. Note that a paid-ad source name such as facebook-ads still reads as Social here (the word facebook matches the social list), which is why you should always add a paid utm_medium for ads.
• Untagged email often shows as Direct. Most email clients send no referrer, so an untagged newsletter link looks like Direct. Gmail on the web and Outlook on the web are detected and counted as Email even without tags, but native and mobile mail apps usually are not. Tag every newsletter link with utm_medium=email.
• Platform subdomains count as Social. Links from platform subdomains such as m.facebook.com, l.instagram.com, out.reddit.com, or mobile.twitter.com resolve to their parent platform and land in Social, not Referral.
• Generic email words must match the whole source. utm_source=campaign, ghost, drip, or loops count as Email only when the value is exactly that word. A value like utm_source=summer-campaign is not an email signal and lands in Referral. Distinctive platform names (mailchimp, klaviyo, newsletter, and similar) still match inside longer values.
• Link shorteners follow their destination. X's t.co is recognized as Social. Other shorteners redirect to the final site, so the channel follows whatever referrer the browser ends up reporting.
• Self-referrals count as Direct. If the referring page is your own site (an internal link), the visit is treated as internal navigation and counted as Direct, not Referral.
• Some AI engines appear under Organic. Perplexity, You.com, and Brave Search are treated as search engines for the channel, so they show under Organic while also being flagged as AI Traffic. Most other assistants (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini) show under Referral plus the AI Traffic flag.
• Casing creates duplicate sources. Classification is case-insensitive, so utm_source=Email and utm_source=email both land in the Email channel. But the raw tag is stored exactly as written, so the two appear as separate rows in the Source breakdown. Always lowercase your tags.

FAQ

Why does my email traffic show as Direct? The link had no utm_medium=email and no recognized email-platform source, and the mail client sent no referrer. Add utm_medium=email to every newsletter link and the problem goes away for future sends.

Why is my "bing" + "cpc" campaign labeled "Bing Ads" on the Revenue tab? The Revenue tab uses friendly display names. When utm_source is a known search engine (google, bing, yahoo, duckduckgo) and the visit is marked as paid, it shows "Bing Ads" style labels; the same engine seen organically shows "Bing (Organic)". The paid label appears when the medium contains any paid keyword (cpc, ppc, paid, display, banner, cpm, matched case-insensitively) or when the click carried an ad click ID.

Why did my "Paid Social" campaign land in Paid instead of Social? Any utm_medium containing paid matches the Paid rule, which is evaluated before the Social rule. Use utm_medium=social for organic posts. Paid social ads intentionally count as Paid.

Why is my Google Ads click Paid when I did not add any UTMs? Google appends a gclid click ID to ad clicks automatically, and a click ID always classifies as Paid. You do not need to tag Google or Microsoft ad links manually.

Why do Perplexity and You.com visits show under Organic? They are treated as answer and search engines for the channel. They are also flagged as AI Traffic, so you can still isolate them in the AI view.

Why are "email" and "Email" two different sources? Casing. The channel is the same for both, but the stored source string is kept verbatim, so different capitalizations split into separate rows. Lowercase everything to keep one clean row per source.

Related

• Attribution models
• Visitor identification
• Dashboard overview