Google Analytics: in which channel are the visits from the unpaid custom campaigns included?

Question

If I'd want to present the data using the existing Google Analytics channels, like Paid Search, Social, Referrals, where would the visits coming from unpaid custom campaigns be aggregated?

For example, say I've used a snippet like this as part of my unpaid campaign:

?utm_source=reddit.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=my_campaign&utm_content=articleShare

Are these visits aggregated with the other information under the Social channel: Acquisition > Social > Network referrals: reddit.com / social?

I know that the stats for the campaigns are to be found in Acquisition > Campaigns: my_campaign, I don't understand is in which channel I should include that data.

Hopefully my question is not completely dumb.

Answer 1

One way to find this out is in GA itself.

You could create a custom report filtered by your specific campaign, but the easiest thing to do is go on the 'All Campaigns' report in Acquisition.

Set the Secondary Dimension to 'Default Channel Grouping'. Find your 'my_campaign' campaign there, and the Default Channel Grouping will appear next to it. For me, this looks like this:

By default, GA will categorise your traffic's Channel Grouping as Social both because you have set the Medium as 'Social' and because it will recognise Reddit.com referrals as social traffic. There's more info on this here: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/3297892?hl=en

Bear in mind that you can change how GA groups traffic into Channels in the GA Admin, where you can either change the existing Channel definitions or add your own (this is in Admin > View > Channel Settings > Channel Grouping)