# Channel

> What a marketing channel is in analytics, how visits are sorted into channels, and the nine channels MIRA FIVE uses, AI assistants included.

URL: https://mirafive.io/glossary/channel  
Updated: 2026-09-26

A channel is the kind of route that brought a visitor, such as paid search, email or organic social, grouping many referrers into a few.

A channel groups the many places visitors come from into a few kinds. Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo are all organic search; an ad on Google and an ad on Bing are both paid search. Channels make reports readable: nine rows instead of four hundred referrers, and a clear line between traffic you pay for and traffic you earn.

Tools assign a channel from each visit’s referrer, [UTM parameters](https://mirafive.io/glossary/utm-parameters) and ad [click ID](https://mirafive.io/glossary/click-id). Tagging your own links consistently keeps campaigns in the right channel.

## In MIRA FIVE

Acquisition sorts every visit into one of nine channels: paid search, paid social, email, AI assistants, organic search, organic social, campaign, referral and direct. Campaigns sit inside each channel. Channels can be credited by first touch or last touch, and the Overview’s “What changed” names the channels that gained or lost buyers against the previous period. Filtering the Overview on one channel turns it into that channel’s page.

## Example

In the Acme Shop’s last 30 days, Direct brought 525 visits and 22 buyers, Organic search 438 visits and 24 buyers, and AI assistants 86 visits and 7 buyers.

## Read next

### Guides on this

### [Why so much traffic shows up as Direct](https://mirafive.io/learn/why-traffic-shows-as-direct)

Why visits land under Direct when links from apps, newsletters, PDFs and WhatsApp lose their referrer, and how UTM tags and Google Ads auto-tagging fix it.

### [How to tag every campaign with UTM parameters](https://mirafive.io/learn/utm-parameters-for-every-campaign)

UTM parameters for every campaign, with the five tags, a naming convention, the utm\_medium value for each channel and ready tags for Google Ads, Meta and email.

### Related terms

- [UTM parameters](https://mirafive.io/glossary/utm-parameters)
- [Click ID](https://mirafive.io/glossary/click-id)
- [First-touch attribution](https://mirafive.io/glossary/first-touch)
- [AI assistant traffic](https://mirafive.io/glossary/ai-assistant-traffic)

[All terms](https://mirafive.io/glossary)

## See which channel brings buyers

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