What do the source names in a customer journey mean?
Each step names where a visit came from, and some names cover more than ads, so Facebook and Instagram visits both show as Meta Ad.
How steps are named
Each step in a journey names the source of a visit. TrueROAS works the name out from the visit's tracking details, such as the UTM tags on the link the customer clicked or the website they came from. A step names a platform or channel, not the ad or campaign behind it.
| Step | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Meta Ad | Every visit from Meta, Facebook or Instagram, whether it came from an ad or not. A click on a link in an Instagram profile counts here too. |
| Google Ad | Visits from your Google Ads, and any other visit from Google that TrueROAS does not recognise as an unpaid search result. |
| Google Organic | Visits from a Google search result that was not an ad. |
| Tik Tok Ad | Every visit from TikTok, whether it came from an ad or not. |
| Bing Ad | Every visit from Bing, from a Microsoft Ads ad or from a Bing search. |
| Pinterest Ad, Snapchat Ad | Every visit from that platform, whether it came from an ad or not. |
| AppLovin Ad | Visits from your AppLovin ads. |
| Visits from an email, for example from Klaviyo or another email tool. | |
| SMS | Visits from a text message. |
| Whats App | Visits from WhatsApp. |
| Yahoo | Visits from Yahoo. |
| Chat GPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini | Visits from that AI assistant. |
| A website | A visit from another website, such as a blog or a shop that links to yours. The step is named after that website, or reads Referring Sites when TrueROAS cannot tell which website it was. |
| Any other name | Visits from other places, such as YouTube, LinkedIn or Reddit, and the names in your own tracking links, such as a custom source, show under that name, with a capital at the start of each word. |
| Direct | The customer typed your address, used a bookmark or came without any tracking details, so TrueROAS found no source. |
| Other Source | A source TrueROAS could not name, such as a bare ID in a link. |
| Shopify Draft Order, Shopify POS, Subscription | The order itself was a Shopify draft order, an in-person sale through Shopify POS or a subscription renewal. These steps come at the end of a journey. |
| Unknown | Nothing could be named for the order. |
Visits from payment pages and from your own store never become steps. When a journey reads Direct or Unknown, the rules in How does TrueROAS build a customer journey? explain why.
Icons on the steps
Most steps show the platform's logo: Meta Ad, Google Ad, Google Organic, Tik Tok Ad, Pinterest Ad, Snapchat Ad and AppLovin Ad, and the Shopify logo on Shopify Draft Order and Shopify POS. Email has an envelope, Direct a shop front, the AI assistants a sparkle and websites a globe. Bing Ad, SMS, Whats App, Yahoo, Subscription, Referring Sites, Other Source, Unknown and most other names show only their name.
Names in the two click cards
The cards First click that started the journey and Last click before buying do not use these steps and can name a source differently, for example Google Ads instead of Google Ad. See Which sources start my customers' journeys and which close the sale?.
Good to know
- The names are the same for everyone on the store.
- You cannot rename a step or move a source to another step.
- Long names are cut off on the step.
- Only the Google Ad, Meta Ad and Tik Tok Ad steps can be clicked, in the cards How your channels work together, Journeys that include Google Ads and Journeys that include Meta Ads. Clicking one lists the ads behind it. See How do I see which ads are behind a source on Customer Journeys?.
- If many of your journeys read Direct, many visits reached your store without any tracking details. Links in your emails and text messages that carry UTM tags let TrueROAS name those visits.
- Order Flow and the Ads Manager use their own names for sources. See What do the columns in Order Flow mean? and What is Organic & Unassigned and what do its rows mean?.