ProDir: Canadian buyers, US data-center noise

Acquisition

Direct dominates ProDir at 79.1% of sessions, but produces only 36.7% of measured key events. Referral, despite being the third-largest channel, converts at the highest rate.

The Referral row is dominated by governancesolutions.ca / referral at 1,856 sessions and 74 key events. That is users moving from GSI into ProDir — a programmatic cross-promotion that is working as designed.

Top source / medium (last-touch)

RD Station / email at 112 sessions is the only owned email traffic carrying UTM tags. Other email blasts without UTMs land in Direct; we cannot separate true brand-awareness Direct from leak using GA4 alone.

Monthly trend

October 2025 is a clear outlier at 3,945 sessions, driven by Direct (3,377 of the month total). It lines up with the Designation Information Session pages dated October 3, October 7, and October 14 dominating the top-pages list.

Year-over-year

ProDir sessions grew 28.9% over the prior 12 months, almost entirely on Direct (+45.0%). Email appears as a new channel because of the RD Station / email UTMs — that traffic existed before but was not tagged.

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Attribution

GA4's data-driven model is in effect. The signal we can read here is the divergence between first-user and session source/medium — which channel introduces a user to the site, versus which channel is present when a key event happens.

Direct opens and closes most journeys — first-touch share (82.2%) actually exceeds session share (79.1%). Organic Search shows slightly more last-touch than first-touch volume, behaving in part as an assist channel. Users who first arrive via the GSI cross-referral often re-enter directly afterwards.

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Conversion goals and funnel

The form-start to form-submit step is healthy at 58.5%, and the friction is upstream of the form, not in the form itself.

Where form_submit actually fires

Decomposed by page, the 1,714 form_submit events split into three buckets. Only the third one — 107 events on long-tail program and contact pages — represents real lead intent.

Flagging form_submit globally as a key event would inflate the conversion count by ~94% noise. A page-scoped rule on the lead-bearing pages — consultation request, free-trial form, designation information session sign-up — is the right move. The roadmap entry sits in §10.

Form completion by channel

Form-start to submit completion sits between 54% and 61% across the major channels. The form itself is not the bottleneck.

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Geography

Canada and the United States together make up 72.0% of ProDir sessions but 84.8% of key events. The program is bought primarily in Canada (CR 2.11%) and barely converts in the US (CR 0.20%) — and most of the apparent US volume is not human traffic.

All other countries combined contribute 3,652 sessions and 31 key events; small-volume markets are excluded from the table to keep the read clean.

Canada vs. United States

Virginia at 2,934 sessions and 1 key event is dominated by Ashburn (2,253 sessions, 0 key events) — well-known cloud data-center traffic that GA4 attributes as US user activity. After excluding Ashburn, real human US sessions drop to ~5,200 with a similarly poor real CR.

Top 10 cities

Several rows on this list (marked DC) are major cloud-region cities. They are kept on the table because the data-center finding lives in city-level detail.

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Top landing pages and device

The Designation Information Session pages collectively account for ~1,500 sessions but record one key event combined. The form_submit on those pages is presumably the registration sign-up — but form_submit is not flagged, so the conversion is invisible in the GA4 dashboards. The fix is mechanical and is routed to §10.

Device split

ProDir is a desktop-first audience at 90.4% of sessions. Mobile converts slightly better, but the absolute volume is too small to act on alone.

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Sector synthesis

GA4 does not see industry on an anonymous web visitor, so we triangulate with three external signals: LinkedIn paid impression-share by industry, LinkedIn organic visitor demographics on the GSI Page, and LinkedIn organic follower demographics. The three signals agree on the same cluster.

LinkedIn paid impression share — top 5 industries

LinkedIn organic — visitors vs. followers on the GSI Page

Financial Services jumps from 4.6% of followers to 15.0% of visitors, and Investment Management appears in the visitor top 10 without being in the follower top 10. People researching governance content on LinkedIn skew financial-services more than the existing follower base. The directional read is consistent across the three signals: financial services, management consulting, government / non-profit, and higher education form the dominant ProDir / GSI sector cluster.