The “Other” Google Analytics Traffic Source

Lately, my Google Analytics reports for LearnWithBetsy.com have been a little confusing. When you look at the traffic sources overview… do you see that little yellow slice of the pie?

Yes, the one that says “Other.”

What exactly does that mean? The other pie slices made sense to me:

• Search Engines = traffic from Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc
• Referring Sites = sites that link to me
• Direct Traffic = visitors that arrive by typing in my URL (or used a bookmark, etc)

But “Other” ….what’s that?

I asked a friend who’s also pretty tech-savvy, but she wasn’t sure either.

Fast forward to today. I’d finally had enough of checking my stats and wondering what what traffic sources comprised that mysterious “other” segment of my Google Analytics pie chart.

So, I googled this search term:

google analytics traffic source other

Not surprisingly, a fair number of people are confused about what exactly this “other” traffic source means, and more specifically, how you can see more details about these other traffic sources.

After doing a little research online, I discovered that you can indeed see the “other” traffic sources from the Google Analytics interface. It’s pretty simple, actually. On the “all traffic sources” page, just toggle the “show” filter to display sources by “medium” (rather than by “source,” or “source medium”).

Then, Google Analytics will display all the different types of traffic your site has had. In my case, the traffic sources were:

• organic = unpaid search engine listings
• referral = another site that linked to me
• (none) = direct traffic
• feed = RSS/Atom Feed
• email = traffic originating from an email

Now, that makes sense!

If you’re managing an email campaign, or send out email newsletters, this means you can tell what percentage of your visits are arriving because of your email marketing tactics.

During the course of my research, I also discovered a nifty way to “add” more “other” sources. Google Analytics includes some parameters you can add to your URLs in order to have more accurate tracking in Analytics.

Meaning this. Instead of simply providing the standard link:

http://learnwithbetsy.com

Say I provided this link in my newsletter:

http://learnwithbetsy.com/?utm_medium=newsletter

Then Google Analytics would track that traffic source as the medium “newsletter” …it would show up along with feed, email, etc in the report. So, I would be able to more specifically track who arrived to my site specifically because of my newsletter.

Alex Cohen discusses how to use Google campaign parameters in great detail. I’d check it out if you’re interested in exploring this concept further.