Understanding initial source tracking with JavaScript

You will learn

Learn where to find the Initial Source property on a profile and understand how it records the first website visit captured by Klaviyo's onsite tracking.

To collect this information, set up Klaviyo onsite tracking on your website. Klaviyo can capture the referring page and landing page before a visitor is identified, then associate that information with their profile when they are identified.

Accessing the initial source information

1. Open a profile and select the Details tab.
2. In the Information section of the profile, find How they found you. The Campaign field shows the profile's Initial Source value.

The separate Source field can show a search engine name, a referring domain, (direct), or the landing URL's utm_source value.

Possible values

The possible Initial Source values, shown next to Campaign, are:

• (direct)
  The person either entered your site URL directly in their browser or we cannot tell where the person came from.
• (referral)
  The person came from another website by clicking a link on that site.
• (organic)
  Klaviyo recognized a search engine and search term in the referring URL. Search visits without a detectable search term can appear as (referral).
• A custom campaign value
  If the landing URL includes utm_campaign, its value appears here. For example, utm_campaign=spring_sale sets Initial Source to spring_sale. Learn more about UTM tracking in Klaviyo.

If the landing URL contains utm_source, utm_medium, utm_term, or utm_content without utm_campaign, Campaign is blank. Missing values appear as a dash (-).

Initial source information stays the same on later visits. To see more recent referral information, check How they found you recently in the same Information section.

Additional resources