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Hi, I’d like to create a cohort or segment with users whose first source is neither any UTM nor referral. Simply for users who came from what it’s called as a direct/none source (mostly people who typed the website name in the URL bar).

How to do this?

I’ve discovered I can create a cohort with users who:
- performed “Viewed” event
- where the UTM source is none
- where the UTM medium is none
- where the referrer is none
- with historical count = 1st time

I’ve also read the difference between historical count and event historical count here: https://help.amplitude.com/hc/en-us/articles/360040957432-Historical-Count-Track-user-behavior-for-different-instances-of-each-user-action

and it looks like only the 1st feature is available when creating a cohort which is not ideal and doesn’t solve my case.
Any ideas how to do it?

@Kajetan Walczak welcome! Not sure I understand your question. When you create the cohort using the UTM source filter and Page Viewed event, do you see an option for “none” or “direct”? Alternatively, you could create a filter that selects all UTM sources and use the “is not” rule. Not sure if I understood your question properly, please let me know!


Hey @Esther Trapadoux thanks for the reply. But that doesn’t solve my problem.
I can create the cohort with UTM source = (none) but this will give me the people who never had any UTM source assigned. So for example if someone found my website from google/organic they would be within this cohort. And my goal is to filter out people whose 1st source is direct.

Your alternative solution also won’t work becuase if I will filter out all UTM sources I will filter all people who had any UTMs at least once. And I need a cohort based on the very first source.


Hey @Kajetan Walczak. If you scroll through your user properties do you see “initial_” variants, such as “initial_utm_source”? We have these passed in our setup (via the Marketing Browser SDK), I think if you have them/ can get them you should then be able to get to what you need…they only pass once and are then persisted against the user.


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