Bearing

Help · Use Bearing

Sources and campaigns

Where your visitors come from: search engines, social networks, AI assistants, newsletters, and your own tagged links.

How sources are named

Bearing reads where a visit came from and gives it a readable name: Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Instagram, Facebook, X, LinkedIn, YouTube, Reddit, Substack… and AI assistants: ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot. Other sites appear under their domain. Visits with no origin are Direct.

Tag your own links

Many apps and emails hide where a visitor comes from. A tagged link says it in the address itself. The simplest way: your site's Markers tab makes it for you under Make a campaign link (see Markers).

By hand, add UTM parameters to the links you share, and Bearing uses them first:

https://example.com/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=november
  • utm_source becomes the source (ig and fb are recognised as Instagram and Facebook).
  • utm_campaign and utm_medium fill the Campaigns and Mediums lists.
  • ?ref= or ?source= work too, as a shorter way to name the source.

Only tag links that lead to your site from elsewhere. A tagged link from one page of your site to another would make every visit look like it came from that campaign.