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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:

  1. Does Google exclude campaign traffic from it's social reports?
  2. If it does, is there any way to reconcile that so that the traffic shows up in both reports?
  3. 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.

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  • I am having the same issue with the stats. I have also looked at my server logs and they differ as well (although iut is closer to my Google Analytivs than FB stats). In fact the click rate I get on Facebook on one of the days is more than the entire visits I have on my GA. Google - 3600 Server - 3900 Facebook - 10700 I wonder if the record of people leaving Facebook and arriving at my site is not due to slow internet speeds in the countries I am targeting? I also read that many users redirect from Facebook before they reach the site, so it gives an incorrect reading. I had a look at the stats
    – user22871
    Commented Jan 29, 2013 at 15:02
  • what medium did you put in your campaign tags? Commented May 29, 2013 at 17:56

2 Answers 2

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Using UTM parameters is a great way to get the data to pass onto Google Analytics. You can even use the Google Help URL Builder to do this: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033867?hl=en-GB

I believe that the Social tab on Google Analytics is only for Unpaid Social. If you want to track all Social then use UTM parameters as linked above.

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  1. GA's Social Analytics are specifically defined, however you can change these and create your own as outlined here https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/3196909#channeledit

  2. Also, you don't mention it but you should have a Facebook Conversion Pixel implemented on your landing page.

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