What is utm_medium=paid?

Who adds it

Meta says it may add Campaign Medium = paid to ad traffic automatically, including for Shopify merchants. Other advertisers set it by hand.

What it means

The visit came from a paid ad. GA4's paid rule matches any medium starting with paid, so the channel depends on the source: Paid Social for social sites, Paid Search for search engines, Paid Other otherwise.

What to do with it

Check the source next to it to see which platform ran the ad. An fbclid on the same URL points to Meta.

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

As of January 1, 2024, you may have the below URL parameters automatically added to your ad traffic: Campaign Source = Facebook or Instagram Campaign Medium = paid

Add URL Parameters to Your Meta Ads - Meta Business Help Center

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

Default channel group - Analytics Help