Google Analytics: Secrets of Traffic Source in Custom Reports

Making your Paid and Planned traffic work in Google Analytics:

Google Analytics has it's own not well documented way of internally attributing valuation to Traffic Source.  Below is a short list of what Google says they do with medium, and the absolute values to use for different traffic types.

Reference: Paid traffic is what you buy from search, in-text, or other partners. Unpaid traffic comes from the tagged URLs in your social media posts and shares, emails, or RSS. 

Campaign Medium - it's the law:

Problem / solution: if you use the right utm_medium values in your URL tags for inbound traffic, then Google Analtyics will dump that traffic into the right buckets. Basically, this is the only way to have accurate data that shows how your paid or unpaid traffic is performing. 

Use this guide below to help in creating your campaign tagging practices so that your paid, display, social, email sources get separated from direct, referral and organics. 

What Google Says:

Medium = traffic type
GA parameter is utm_medium

The only way to set Medium values is to to campaign tags on your paid or planned traffic. The utm_medium parameter is used to designate medium values. Look it up here. 

This list shows how Google Analytics interprets medium values internally. 
Only the values listed below as "paid" will be separated in GA from other traffic medium. 

If no value is used, GA will most likely inflate referral with sources that really belong in these buckets below. 

Value  -- GA Interpretation
-------------------------------------

social  -- social media reporting

cpc      -- paid
cpp      -- paid
cpa      -- paid
cpv      -- paid
ppc      -- paid

cpm     -- display

{other} -- some value outside of this list -- it will not be attributed as direct, organic, or referral... or paid.

Let me know if this helps. Find me from the links on my about.me page.