70% of my traffic says direct and i am running three channels - how do i tell them apart

Most of that 70% is not mysterious, it is mechanical. Links opened from email clients, chat apps and PDFs arrive with no referrer at all, so anything you send by newsletter or drop into a Discord lands in the same bucket as someone typing your domain. Browser referrer policies strip the rest down to the bare domain or nothing.

The fix is tagging every link you control with campaign parameters. Email links, community posts, your profile links, the footer of a PDF - all tagged. That converts dark traffic into named traffic without any new tooling.

One rule people get wrong: tag inbound links only, never links between your own pages. Putting campaign parameters on internal links starts a new session and overwrites the original source, which quietly poisons the data you are trying to collect.

At 900 visits a month, attribution engineering is theatre. Twenty signups split three ways is six or seven each and every difference you see is noise.

Put one optional question on the signup form: how did you hear about this. Five options plus other, radio buttons, not required. I get 60 to 70% completion on that and it has been more useful than any analytics I have ever installed, partly because the answers include things no tool can see - a friend told me, my colleague uses it, someone mentioned it on a call.

At your size, twenty honest answers beats a perfect pipeline of events you will never query.

Also assume your page view numbers are undercounts. Blockers and consent choices eat somewhere between a tenth and a third of client-side tracking depending on audience, and a developer-heavy audience is at the ugly end of that range.

The one number I trust completely is a server-side event recorded at signup, written to my own database, with whatever source information I had at the time. Page views are for direction. Signups are for decisions.

The self-report answers are worth having but do not treat them as truth. People genuinely cannot remember where they first heard about something - anyone who searched your name after seeing it somewhere will say search, and you will cheerfully invest in the wrong channel.

Use both. First-touch source in a cookie at first visit, carried through to signup, plus the survey question. Where they disagree is interesting rather than annoying: it usually means the channel that gets credit is where they looked you up, and the channel that gets remembered is where they were persuaded.