What is utm_medium=cpc?

Who adds it

Ad platforms and advertisers set it. Microsoft Advertising's auto-tagging sets utm_medium=cpc, and Google Analytics reports auto-tagged Google Ads clicks as google / cpc.

What it means

The visit came from a paid ad click. GA4 puts it in Paid Search when the source is a search engine, Paid Social for social sites, Paid Video for video sites, and Paid Other otherwise.

What to do with it

Keep it on paid links only. Using cpc on organic posts moves those visits into paid channels in GA4.

How Vireo shows it

Vireo Pro's UTM campaigns card lists tagged visits by Source, Medium and Campaign, with visitors and pageviews. The tags are read from the first page of each visit, and the same tags feed revenue by source.

In the free plugin, Vireo drops the query string from page addresses, keeping only a few WordPress ones such as p and page_id, so a tagged URL counts as the same page as the untagged one. The visit is counted under the referrer it arrived with.

UTM campaigns are part of Vireo Pro. See UTM campaigns in the docs.

Sources

Paid Search Source matches a list of search sites AND Medium matches regex ^(.*cp.*|ppc|retargeting|paid.*)$

Default channel group - Analytics Help

Paid Other Medium matches regex ^(.*cp.*|ppc|retargeting|paid.*)$

Default channel group - Analytics Help

utm_medium Which channel was used. Microsoft Advertising sets this to cpc.

How do I add UTM tags to my landing page URL? - Microsoft Advertising