Traffic sources & channels
This report answers one question: where do my visitors come from? Snow takes the raw referrer of every visit and the tags on your links, then organizes them into something you can actually read: channels, sources, and campaigns.
Three views
The Sources card has three tabs:
- Referrers: the individual sites and sources that sent you traffic, ranked.
- Channels: those referrers grouped into a donut of high-level channels (below).
- Campaigns: your UTM and short-link tags, with a dropdown to switch between
utm_campaign,utm_source,utm_medium,utm_term,utm_content, and theref/source/viashortcuts.
Each tab can sort by visitors, by revenue (with Stripe connected), or by time on site: tap the sort toggle to cycle. Click any row to filter the whole dashboard.
Channels
A channel is a high-level bucket for a kind of traffic. Instead of a long, messy list of individual referring websites, Snow sorts each visit into one of ten canonical channels automatically, a GA4-style grouping you may know from other analytics tools:
- Direct: no referrer; people who typed your address or used a bookmark.
- Organic Search: unpaid visits from search engines like Google or Bing.
- Paid Search: visits from search ads.
- Organic Social: visits from social networks like LinkedIn, X, or Reddit.
- Referral: links from other websites.
- Organic Shopping: visits from shopping platforms and marketplaces.
- A.I.: visits from AI assistants and answer engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity.
- Affiliate: partner and affiliate links.
- Newsletter: visits from your email newsletters.
- Unassigned: anything Snow can’t confidently place in one of the above.
You don’t have to configure any of this. Snow groups traffic for you out of the box.
Channels are about understanding the mix of your traffic at a glance. For the exact site or campaign behind a channel, switch to the source and UTM breakdowns below.
UTM parameters
When you tag your links with UTM parameters, Snow reads them and lets you break traffic down by each one. These are the standard campaign tags you add to a URL:
| Parameter | What it usually holds |
|---|---|
utm_source | Where the link lives, e.g. newsletter, twitter. |
utm_medium | The kind of link, e.g. email, cpc, social. |
utm_campaign | The campaign name, e.g. spring-launch. |
utm_term | A keyword, often for paid search. |
utm_content | Which version of a link, for A/B tests. |
A tagged link looks like this:
https://example.com/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=spring-launchSwitch the breakdown between these parameters to see, for example, which campaign drove the most visits, or which source within a campaign worked best.
The ref, source, and via shortcuts
UTM tags are great, but they’re verbose. For quick links, Snow also reads three
short parameters (ref, source, and via) and reports on them the same way:
https://example.com/?ref=podcast
https://example.com/?via=partner-siteHandy for a one-off link where a full utm_* set would be overkill. To tie the
campaigns behind a channel to actual sales, see
Attribute revenue to visitors.
Click to filter
Every channel, source, and campaign in this report is clickable. Click one and the entire dashboard filters down to just that traffic: the Overview numbers, the chart, pages, locations, and devices all update to reflect only those visitors.
Filters stack, so you can drill in: click Organic Search, then a country, to see search visitors from one place. Filters also live in the URL, so a filtered view is a link you can bookmark or share. See Filtering & date ranges for the full picture.