How many links do you need?

Google Analytics files every visit under a channel such as Organic Social, Email or Paid Social, and it decides from the source and medium tags. A medium of social is Organic Social from anywhere. One that starts with paid is Paid Social only when the source is on Google's own list of social sites. A medium it does not recognize, from a source it does not know, lands in Unassigned, the row nobody can act on.

The builder sorts every link by the same rules, against the same list of about 800 sites Google publishes, so the channel it shows is the one the report will show. The list holds two surprises for small businesses. Yelp is on it as a social site, so Yelp visits count as Organic Social. Nextdoor is not, so a Nextdoor ad lands in Paid Other rather than Paid Social.

These are the tags the builder uses for each place, and where Analytics puts the visit:

Analytics has no channel for print, so a flyer or a yard sign stays Unassigned whatever you call it. Switch the traffic acquisition report to source and medium and each piece still has a line of its own, which is enough to count it. A banner on another site takes that site's name as its source, as does a partner, a directory or a show.

Google treats tag values as case sensitive. A post tagged Facebook one month and facebook the next shows up as two sources with half the visits each, and nothing warns you. The builder writes every value in lower case with hyphens between words, so “Spring Tune Up” becomes spring-tune-up whoever types it.

Two words in a campaign name move every link that carries it. Analytics reads shop or shopping as a shopping campaign, so a Facebook post for a “shop local” campaign lands in Organic Shopping, and it reads cross-network as one of Google's own campaigns. The builder warns you when a name holds either.

Name campaigns for what they are and keep the names. A list of the ones you use, kept where whoever makes the next post can find it, does more for clean reports than any tool.

Without tags, a click on the website button in your Business Profile usually looks like an ordinary Google search visit, so the profile gets no credit for the customers it sends. Tagged with google as the source, the visit still counts as Organic Search, and the medium gbp keeps it on a line of its own.

Our client portal reads the same tags. Every form lead carries the tags of the link that brought the visitor, and a gbp medium is how a lead from the profile is told apart from one that came from a search result.

Leave Google Ads and Microsoft Ads links untagged and turn on their auto-tagging instead. Their click ids carry more than these tags can, and Analytics prefers them when both are on the same click. On the Google Ads accounts we run, an account-wide final URL suffix adds the campaign, ad and keyword as tags as well, for the forms and systems that read the address rather than Analytics. The builder gives you the same suffix. On Meta, one line of URL parameters on each ad does the same job for every ad in the account.

Never tag links between pages of your own site. A tag tells Analytics where the visit came from, so a tagged menu link rewrites a Facebook visit as one from your own menu.

Tags describe the click, not the call. Someone who reads a tagged page and then dials the number on it is a call Analytics never sees, unless that number is a tracking number that changes with the visit. A link shortener or a QR code keeps the tags, because both send people on to the full link.