Google Analytics shows wrong traffic source

[S.S.N]

I was reviewing out traffic sources on GA for  this past week's traffic history, and noticed a couple of visits & conversions that GA cited as coming from campaigns from emails that were sent out in 2012 and early 2013.  it seems odd that we would have traffic & conversions from these older campaigns  - on a regular basis.  it's not even from one campaign, but from multiple campaigns.

is it possible that it is a cookie issue?  - i wonder if these visits were really from the email campaigns - or if they were from organic searches or other sources.

Thoughts?

Thanks!

[S.S.N]

Thank you so much! This makes sense now.  Def. a great thing that they're loyal customers. Now I know I can just attribute it to direct, this helps me better track actual campaigns.

[LynnPatchett]

Hi Sara,

It could be a cookie issue if these visitors are originally arriving through a mail link and then revisiting directly. Direct visits do not overwrite the campaign/source cookie on the users computer so the visit is attributed to whichever source last brought them to your site which was recorded. So you could have a click from a mail link, and then 10 direct visits from the same user and this would show as 11 visits from a mail link. Campaign sources are updated when the user arrives through organic search, a referral site or a tagged campaign link (mail, ppc etc) but not when a direct visit is recorded with an existing cookie value (which btw has a 6 month lifespan). Check here for the techy bit, half way down the page at 'What Causes Updates to the __utmz Campaign Cookie?' https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2731565?hl=en

There could be a couple of other outlying scenarios (users bookmark the page from a mail link with the utm values still in the url for example) but I think the direct visits are probably the bulk of the numbers you are seeing. The flip side is that these are usually pretty dedicated customers to your brand, hence the conversions, so things are looking good