Some clarifications about how GA's Traffic Source tracking works:
- You don't need to integrate Webmaster Tools (i.e. Search Console) with GA to get Organic Search data. However, integrating it will help you get the "Search console" set of reports.
- By itself, GA can identify direct, organic search, referral and some social traffic.
- To identify paid search traffic, you need to integrate with AdWords and enable auto-tagging, OR add the utm_medium=cpc parameter to your landing page URLs. Otherwise, GA by itself has no way of identifying paid search traffic.
Now, on to AA:
AA actually has 2 sets of "traffic source" reports. One set is based on Referring URLs, the other is based on Tracking Code.
Referring URLs populates other Referral reports. These are based on AA being able to read the document.referrer when its tag (normally the pageview tag) runs in a web page. Resulting from this, if the user's web browser doesn't report any document.referrer, then AA is unable to populate its Referral reports, and the Referrer is recorded as "Typed/Bookmarked" (which is similar to GA's "direct / (none)" Source/Medium).
The Search Engine reports are a subset of these Referral reports. This happens when AA has identified from the Referring URL that it belongs to a search engine and has a parameter that includes the user's search keyword. If those 2 conditions are matched, then the Referrer gets reported in the Search Engine report too.
To distinguish between Natural Search Engine and Paid Search Engine, AA then depends on the Paid Search Detection setting in your report suite. That setting is where you indicate the URL parameter that must be present in the landing page URL when the user comes from a paid search ad. Therefore, there are 3 conditions for a Referring URL to be reported in the Paid Search Engine report: the Referring URL must be from a known search engine, it must have the parameter that includes the user's search keyword, and the landing page URL must have a parameter that has been specified in the Paid Search Detection setting.
Normally, in the Paid Search Detection setting, you'd use the same URL parameter that you use to track your Tracking Code.
AA's Tracking Code is like GA's UTM tags concatenated into one long string. But here's the thing that a lot of GA practitioners don't realise: in AA, the Tracking Code does not overwrite the Referring URL. This is different from how GA works.
Example: You have a banner ad that shows up in cnn.com. That banner ad's clickthrough URL includes your Tracking Code parameter, e.g. "?cid=...". When the user clicks that banner ad and lands at your website, AA records two pieces of information: Referring URL = cnn.com, and Tracking Code = the "cid" value.
(Some may argue that this is a more correct method than GA's, because the data is really coming from 2 different places, the browser's document.referrer vs the tracking code URL parameter.)
To "unify" the Referring URL and Tracking Code reports, you rely on the Marketing Channel reports. This is similar to GA's Default Channel Groups, where rules determine what kind of Referring URL/Tracking Code traffic are categorised as what kind of Marketing Channel. This is probably the "traffic source" report that you should rely on for the majority of your reports.
So to summarise:
- Referring / Search Engine reports: depend on the document.referrer reported by the user's browser.
- Tracking Code reports: depend on the tracking code parameter in your landing page URLs
- The same hits can be attributed to both a Referring URL and a Tracking Code.
- Marketing Channel reports: your go-to for traffic source reports.
Hope that helps!
