What is utm_medium=paid_social?

Who adds it

Advertisers set it by hand or through dynamic URL parameters in their ad platform. Google's UTM best-practice guide uses paid_social as its example medium.

What it means

The visit came from a paid ad on a social network. GA4 reads anything starting with paid as a paid medium, so it lands in Paid Social when the source is on Google's list of social sites.

What to do with it

Pair it with a recognised social source such as facebook or instagram. With an unrecognised source, GA4 falls back to Paid Other.

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

Use only one unique utm_medium for each distinct channel. For example, paid_social and organic_search.

URL builders: Collect campaign data with custom URLs - Analytics Help

Paid Social Source matches a regex list of social 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