Organic traffic excludes paid ads, direct visits, referrals, social clicks, and email. It is the primary metric used to measure SEO performance.
How it is measured
Analytics platforms identify organic traffic by the referring URL. Google's HTTPS referrer stripping means most organic visits are labelled "google / organic" with the query hidden — you need Search Console to see the query.
Example
A blog with 200,000 monthly sessions might see 140,000 from organic search, 40,000 direct, 15,000 referral, and 5,000 social.
How SEM Optimiser reports it
Organic traffic is imported from GA4 and joined with Search Console click data for per-query and per-URL attribution.
Related terms
- GSC (Google Search Console)
Google Search Console is a free tool from Google that reports how a site appears in Google Search, including impressions, clicks, position, and indexing state.
- GA4 (Google Analytics 4)
Google Analytics 4 is Google's current web and app analytics platform, based on an event-driven data model that replaced the session-based Universal Analytics in July 2023.
- CTR (Click-Through Rate)
Click-through rate is the percentage of impressions that result in a click, calculated as clicks divided by impressions.
- Conversion Rate
Conversion rate is the percentage of visitors to a website who complete a defined goal, such as a purchase, sign-up, or lead form.