Referrers and attribution
This is a real, honest limitation worth understanding before trusting a source breakdown chart, not something specific to Jellyhook. Every analytics tool that reads a plain referrer hits the same wall.
What a plain referrer actually tells you
The browser hands over the address of whatever page someone was on the instant they clicked through to yours. Nothing more. If they clicked an ad directly, it correctly shows the ad platform. If they saw the ad, opened a new tab, and searched your business name on Google instead, it shows Google, because that is genuinely the page they were on when they clicked through. The ad still caused the visit. The referrer has no way to know that.
Many mobile apps also strip the referrer entirely when opening a link in their own in-app browser, which shows up as Direct even though it was not.
UTM tags: the actual fix, and it takes deliberate setup
Adding ?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=paid to the end of a link, before posting it, is how a marketer labels their own traffic in advance. When a link is tagged this way, Jellyhook uses that tag as the source, ahead of whatever the raw referrer says. Google's and Meta's own click ids on an ad link, when present, are used as a fallback if no UTM tag was added, so a straightforward ad click still gets attributed correctly even without manual tagging. Neither of these can attribute a visit that never clicked a tracked link at all.
First touch, not every visit
The referrer and leads origin charts count each visitor once, under whichever source brought them in the very first time. A visitor who converts weeks later, after several return visits from a bookmark, still counts under their original source, not Direct.