For a while we have used campaign tags when putting posts on Facebook so that we can run campaign reports in Google analytics on those links. However it appears that traffic from those links are being excluded in Google's Social reports. For example between 7/20 and 8/19 I'm seeing 123 Visits where Facebook is the source in my Campaigns report, but only 29 Visits where Facebook is the source in my Social > Sources report.
Main questions:
- Does Google exclude campaign traffic from it's social reports?
- If it does, is there any way to reconcile that so that the traffic shows up in both reports?
- If it doesn't, what could be causing the vast discrepancy?
One observer noted that we are setting the Medium to "Post" when passing the campaign parameters, and that Google may only allow "Referral" traffic in it's social reports (Just speculation). In that case we could potentially change the Medium to "Referral", but that would undermine some of our strategy in being able to set different mediums.
I have also considered that maybe the campaign traffic came to the site several times, and the social report may count the same user as less visits, however over 70% of the Facebook campaign traffic is new traffic, so at a minimum there would need to be over 85 Visits on the Social side for that argument to be valid.
I've done several searches for any information on this topic, and haven't run across much of anything. I did post the same question on Google's Product Forum and have not gotten a response. The title of that question was 'Facebook Campaign Traffic Not Showing in Social Reports'.
The inability to pass campaign data on Facebook posts would make evaluating the performance of those specific posts very difficult, so I'm hoping there is a solution to this.
