“Article traffic sources” report

The report contains information about all the sources that brought readers to articles on your site. To find out how users interact with content or to identify the most popular content, use Content reports.

To view the report: Content → Standard reports → Article traffic sources.

  1. Ways to use this report
  2. Conditions for getting the report
  3. Report structure and settings

Ways to use this report

Pinpoint your traffic sources

The report shows the sources that attracted users to your website.

Determine which sources generate the most pageviews
Find out which sources produce a loyal audience

Your loyal audience is users who spend a long time on the site and read several articles in a session. This is why you can focus on the “Recirculation” metric in the report.

Identifying the sources of pageviews for individual articles

To do this, change the grouping order:

  1. Click Dimensions.
  2. In the window that appears, move the dimension “Article title” to the top of the list.

Conditions for getting the report

To ensure that statistics are collected and displayed correctly, make sure that site content markup follows the recommendations (Schema.org or Open Graph).

Report structure and settings

The report includes sources of traffic to marked-up materials – each pageview of an article is assigned its own source. Unlike in the Sources, summary report, a single session can have several traffic sources if multiple views of content occurred during the session.

For example, a user clicked through to an article from search results, viewed it, moved on to another article, then returned to the previous one. As a result, Yandex Metrica records one pageview of one article, two pageviews of the other, and two sources: a click from the search engine and an internal click-through.

The site may contain not only articles, but also other sections, and it may be that not all articles are marked up. Therefore, the number of sessions in this report may also differ from other reports — it will include only those sessions in which pageviews of content were recorded.

Source Description
Direct traffic

Yandex Metrica attributes traffic to this source in the following cases:

  • The user typed your site URL in the browser's address bar.
  • The user opened your site from their browser bookmarks.
  • The user clicked a link added to site tiles in a new browser tab (for example, in Yandex Browser).
  • The user transitioned from a site that uses the HTTPS protocol to a site with the HTTP protocol.
  • The traffic source was not transmitted to the referrer.
Link traffic Users visited your site by clicking a link on another site. The page URL hosting the link is saved as the referrer.
Search engine traffic Users clicked a link to your site in search results. Yandex Metrica can detect the majority of search engines. Yandex Metrica stores the name of the search engine used, usually along with the search query.
Traffic from social networks Users followed a link posted on a social network. Most social networks identify the user who posted a link or the community it was posted by.
Ad traffic This is traffic generated by Yandex services (Yandex Direct, Yandex Market, Yandex Display), media platforms, and tagged links (such as UTM, Openstat, or Google Ads). For more information, see the Ad systems report.
Messenger traffic
Clicks on links posted in messengers are identified by the referrer and UTM tags.
Learn more
Yandex Metrica collects data on the following messengers:
  • Skype
  • Telegram
  • Viber
  • WeChat
  • WhatsApp
Use these UTM tags to identify your source of traffic:
  • utm_medium (required) with the value messenger (recommended) or social.
  • utm_source. The tag is used to identify the messenger. For example, utm_source=viber. If there is no tag in the URL, the tag value is omitted, or the value isn't recognized by Yandex Metrica, then the source will be labeled as Other messenger: identified by tags.

    Full tag list:
    • skype — for Skype
    • telegram — for Telegram
    • viber — for Viber
    • wechat — for WeChat
    • whatsapp — for WhatsApp
Recommendation system traffic
Clicks on links in news feeds, personalized recommendation lists, and similar sources. Does not include data from traffic exchange networks and news aggregators (Yandex News, Rambler News and Google News).
Learn more
Yandex Metrica recognizes the following recommendation systems:
  • MirTesen.
  • Rambler.
  • Yandex Zen.
  • Flipboard.
  • Google Discover. It does not take into account click-throughs on devices with the iOS operating system.
  • Opera Personal News
  • Pulse (Mail.ru).
  • Sony News Suite
  • Toutiao.
Cached page traffic
Yandex Metrica attributes traffic to this source in the following cases:
  • The user opened your website by clicking a locally saved link (the session might have the referrer file:///С:/Documents/User/page.html).
  • The landing page domain contains localhost or 127.
Internal traffic If the user stopped doing anything on the site and the session timeout expired but the browser was still open, when the user later resumes activity Yandex Metrica registers a new session with “internal traffic” as the source.
Note. For accurate detection of internal traffic, make sure that the correct site URL is shown in the tag settings (in the Tag section).
Mailing traffic
The user clicked a link in an email. This includes:
  • Clicks on links. Detected using UTM, Openstat, and from tags.
  • SMS messages and push notifications. Detected using UTM tags. At the same time, utm_source must have the value sms or push, and utm_medium must not be empty (can have any value).

For more information, see How to correctly create a tag.

Undefined

Undefined means that some of the session characteristics couldn't be identified, although the session itself was registered in the system. For instance, Yandex Direct traffic may have Yandex Direct: Undefined listed as the source. That means that Yandex Metrica recognized the ad platform, but couldn't identify details such as the campaign, keyword, and so on.

Why sessions aren't recognized

There are many reasons why sessions might be “undefined” in Yandex Metrica. For instance, if the source of Yandex Direct traffic appears as Yandex Direct: Undefined, this could mean that there was a lag between generating the yclid tag in Yandex Direct and registering the session in Yandex Metrica. This can happen in the following situations:

  • The user accessed the page by clicking an ad, left the tab open, and later refreshed the page.
  • The user clicked a link from an ad, but then forwarded it to someone else. The repeat session using this link won't be associated with the click from Yandex Direct, either.
  • Redirects on the site may cause yclid tags to disappear from the link and lose the referrer.

The report supports all settings available in Yandex Metrica.