Template · Website traffic by source

Website traffic by source.

Use this template for monthly traffic reviews, board updates, or growth post-mortems. Acquisition channels almost always have skewed distributions — organic dominates, paid is small — and ranked horizontal bars make the shape clear immediately.

Monthly sessions by source

— barsmakebarchart.com

What story this chart tells

The story is dependency. If one source provides more than half of all sessions, that's a concentration risk worth naming. If paid is growing while organic is flat, the trend matters more than the snapshot. Pair this chart with a same-period prior-year version (use the grouped bar chart variant) when telling the trend story.

Adapting it to your data — checklist

  • Use sessions, not page views — sessions are the standard unit for acquisition reports.
  • Combine very small sources into "Other" if there are more than ten.
  • Match the source labels to your analytics tool's default groupings to avoid confusion.
  • Round large numbers to thousands ("28.4K") rather than showing every digit.
  • If you're showing share, switch to a 100% stacked bar across multiple months.
  • Document the date range in the title — without it the chart is meaningless.

The same tool with full controls is on the homepage.

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