What is utm_source=facebook?

Who adds it

Meta says that since January 1, 2024 it may add URL parameters to ad traffic automatically, with Campaign Source set to Facebook or Instagram and Campaign Medium set to paid. Shopify merchants may get the same Facebook source on their Meta ads. Advertisers also add it by hand.

What it means

The visit came from a Meta ad, usually shown on Facebook. The same click typically has an fbclid and an l.facebook.com or lm.facebook.com referrer. An organic share on Facebook carries the referrer but no UTM tags, unless the poster tagged the link.

What to do with it

GA4 counts it as Paid Social when the medium matches its paid pattern, such as paid. Keep the case consistent with any tags you add yourself, since Facebook and facebook are separate values.

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.

When a link carries utm_source with no utm_medium, as ChatGPT's do, Pro's revenue attribution takes the medium from the referrer's source group. With no referrer either, it's labelled campaign.

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