As a webmaster, you’ve probably wondered what’s not considered a source in Google Analytics. Thankfully, there are many ways to change that default. In this article, we’ll cover the sources that Google Analytics doesn’t count. These include unique visitors, User-defined medium, and Offline inventory database. If you’re curious about the difference between these sources and others, read on!
Unique visitor
You may have noticed that unique visitor isn’t always the most accurate metric. The reason behind this is that the unique visitor number is calculated using cookies and other means. Most web analytics tools use cookies to track visitors. However, these cookies can’t distinguish between new and returning visitors. Thus, a person who visits your site from home and at work will be counted as two unique visitors, even though they’ve visited your site before.
To compensate for these factors, you can create a Custom Report that shows the same metrics for the month and day. The metric is called ‘Users’, and includes both new and returning users. So, in the GA Custom Report, you can see the number of unique visitors for each day and month. In this way, you can tell how effective your content is in attracting visitors to your site.
One important factor to remember when using Google Analytics is the size of each visitor’s screen. Your dashboard will display the average screen size of the device used to access your site. If your visitors’ screen is less than 576px, they’re likely using a mobile device. If their screens are larger, they’re using a laptop or desktop. Your dashboard will also show the total number of unique visitors, the percentage of total visitors, and the referral source that sent them to your site.
User-defined medium
Google does not count as a default medium in Google Analytics. The term “medium” simply refers to the general category of sources, such as organic search, web referral, and paid search. The three default mediums in Google Analytics are search engine, domain, and user-defined. These mediums represent the different ways people find your website. The source category will vary based on the type of traffic you get.
A user-defined medium is a medium defined by a website visitor. A user can specify a medium of any type in the utm_medium parameter, such as “paid social”. In Google Analytics, a medium name is case-sensitive, so a custom medium is not considered a source. A user-defined medium may include an email address. In the Source/Medium report, you can view your traffic sources by medium.
In Google Analytics, you can see how much of your traffic comes from each type of source. Email and Facebook are two popular choices for direct marketing, but you can also use the “User-defined medium” source option to identify your direct marketing channel. Google treats these sources as different traffic sources, even though they are the same type of traffic. However, Google doesn’t count them as sources by default because they are case-sensitive.
Offline inventory database
Offline inventory databases cannot be collected by Google Analytics by default. To gather data from offline inventory databases, you must import data using Data Import. Data import allows you to join offline data with online data for analysis and action. Offline inventory data can be imported from a variety of external sources, including offline inventory databases. To learn how to import data into Google Analytics, read on. Listed below are the steps to take to import your offline data.