How to Create Custom Channel Groupings for Marketing Attribution

Every visit to your site is filed under one channel, such as Paid search, Organic social, Email, or Referral. SourceLoop’s built-in rules handle most traffic, but every business has exceptions: partner links counted as Referral, job boards inflating referral traffic, a payment page taking credit for sales, or internal banners tagged with UTMs. Channel mapping fixes them.

Open Setup in the left sidebar, then Channel mapping. Workspace admins and editors can make changes. Only admins can publish.

For how the built-in channels are decided, see Channel definitions.

Step 1: Start with Unsorted traffic

The Unsorted traffic tab lists the traffic that landed in Referral or Other in the last 30 days. It is the quickest way to see what needs a rule, such as a partner site, a review site, or a newsletter tool.

Step 2: Add rules

On the Rules tab, add a rule from a template or from scratch. Templates include:

• Partner and affiliate links: links with ?ref= go to Affiliate, with the partner as the source
• Newsletter tools: Mailchimp, Klaviyo, Substack, and similar land in Email
• Internal promotions: your own banners and pop-ups tagged with UTMs stop stealing credit
• Job boards: Indeed, Glassdoor, and similar go to Job boards, not Referral
• Review sites: review platforms get a channel of their own

A rule has conditions on the visit’s referrer domain, landing page path, UTM values, or any parameter on the landing URL. Conditions can be is, is not, contains, does not contain, starts with, ends with, is missing, or is present.

Then choose what happens:

• File the visit as a channel, optionally with a source, medium, or campaign, fixed or taken from the URL
• Not a marketing touch: the visit keeps the channel the visitor already had

Rules run top to bottom, and the first one that matches wins. Visits that match none keep their built-in channel.

Step 3: Ignore referrers and add channels

• Ignored referrers: sites that should never count as a source, such as Stripe checkout, PayPal, or a sign-in provider. A visit back from them keeps the visitor’s original channel. Common ones are always ignored.
• Custom channels: channels of your own, such as Events or Partners. Templates like Review sites create one for you.

Step 4: Test before you publish

Paste a link into Test a URL to see which channel it lands in with your changes and with SourceLoop’s defaults. The publish preview also shows how many recent visits would change channel.

Step 5: Publish

Changes save as a draft, marked Changes not published yet.

1. Click publish and review What changes.
2. Under Apply to past data, choose Only new visits, the Last 90 days, or All past data (18 months).
3. Add an optional note and publish.

New visits follow your settings within a minute. Past reports, journeys, and contacts’ first and latest touch update in the background. History lists every publish and lets you restore an earlier version.

Bonus: use “How did you hear about us?”

If your forms ask how people found you, the How did you hear tab maps those answers to channels. A lead with no tracked visit who answered “Radio” then counts under Offline, with radio as the source. This saves at once, with no publish needed.

What’s next

• Understand the built-in channels: Channel definitions
• Tag campaigns so they never need a rule: UTM best practices
• Reuse your rules on other clients: Clients overview for agencies