Sessions by Source & Channel

Sessions by Source & Channel shows which channels bring visitors to your store, grouped by how each session first arrived, with the bounce, conversion and revenue for each.

How It’s Calculated

Each row is one channel, with the most sessions first. A session goes to a channel by its first event inside the date range. The columns are:

• Sessions: visits to your store from that channel.
• Visitors: the number of different browsers.
• Conversions: the number of sessions that ended in a purchase.
• Conversion Rate: Conversions divided by Sessions.
• Bounce Rate: the share of sessions with only 1 event recorded.
• Revenue: the value of those purchases. It is the total of the Shopify order each purchase links to: items minus discounts, plus shipping, plus tax that isn’t already in the prices, minus refunds. Where das Pixel couldn’t match an order, it uses the value it saw at checkout.
• Order Linked: the share of the channel’s conversions that matched a Shopify order. A low figure means more of that channel’s revenue comes from the checkout value instead of the order.

Select a row to open Sessions Explorer with that channel and date range.

How a Session Gets Its Channel

das Pixel applies these rules in order and uses the first that fits:

1. Paid Search: a click from Google Ads or Microsoft Ads.
2. Paid Social: a click from Meta Ads or TikTok Ads.
3. Paid Search: a UTM medium of cpc, paid or ppc.
4. Organic Search: a UTM source of google, bing, duckduckgo or baidu with no UTM medium.
5. Organic Social: a UTM medium of social or sm, or a UTM source of facebook, instagram, tiktok, twitter, linkedin, pinterest or youtube.
6. Email: a UTM source or medium of email.
7. Referral: a UTM medium of referral.
8. Direct: no UTM source.
9. Other: anything else, such as a Reddit Ads click.

A click ID in the link, such as gclid or fbclid, counts even when the link has no UTM tags. Both rely on das Pixel seeing the link, which needs the visitor’s marketing consent and Track Marketing on.

A visit with no UTM tags and no ad click goes to Direct, even when it came from another site, a search result or a social post. Direct is therefore larger than the traffic that really typed your address. To split it, tag your links: see How to Tag Your Ads with UTM Parameters.

Summary Cards

The cards above the table are Sessions, Conversions, Conversion Rate, Revenue and Order Match Rate. With Compare on, the first four show their change. Order Match Rate is the match rate across all channels, weighted by conversions.

With unit costs entered, 2 more columns appear: Gross Profit and Profit per Session. Gross Profit is Revenue minus the unit cost of the items sold. It counts only orders that matched a Shopify order and where every item has a cost.

Profit per Session divides it by all of the channel’s sessions. See How to Enter Your Costs.

What Counts

• Visitors who declined analytics cookies, or who opted out of the sale or sharing of their data while Require Sale-of-Data Consent is on, aren’t recorded.
• Bots are left out. Bot & Invalid Traffic counts them.
• Only events inside the date range count, in your store’s time zone.
• Turn on Live to refresh the report every 30 seconds. Without it, a figure can be up to 10 minutes old.

A warning shows above the report when das Pixel saw less than 70% of your online-store orders in the last 30 days. This report has no Segment, Sales Channel or Filters control.

What Good Looks Like

There’s no target. Compare channels by Conversion Rate and Revenue as well as Sessions. A channel with many sessions and a high Bounce Rate brings visitors who leave at once.

Read Order Linked per row. Revenue from a channel with a low figure is less exact.

What to Do About It

• A large Direct share: tag your links and ads so more visits land in a named channel.
• A paid channel with a high Bounce Rate: check the landing page in Entry Pages.
• A channel that converts well: compare its cost in Advertising before you spend more.

Get AI Insight at the top of the report asks Copilot for a short read of it.

Where to Find It

• Sessions by Source & Channel: open Reports and look under Web Analytics.
• UTM Campaign Explorer: the same sessions by UTM source, medium and campaign.