Is Paid Social Counted in the Social Media ROI Dashboards?
TL;DR - It depends on your UTM tracking process
If you don’t use the “medium” UTM parameter to tell Google Analytics whether links posted on Social are coming from organic or paid efforts, everything will show up as organic content inside both Google Analytics and Agorapulse’s Social ROI Dashboards.
If you use “social” and “paid” in your “medium” UTM parameter, all paid data will automatically be filtered out from the Google Analytics and Agorapulse Social ROI Dashboards, leaving you with organic social insights exclusively
1. Inside Google Analytics 4
It can include both paid and organic. It basically includes all users clicking on a link and Google Analytics cannot differentiate on its own paid vs. organic traffic. By default, Google Analytics categorises everything as referral traffic coming from organic social.
If the traffic is differentiated through a UTM "source" between paid and organic, then that distinction can show up in Google Analytics with the “default channel group” filter: content with a link whose “source” UTM = “social” will show up under “organic social” and content with link whose “source” UTM = paid will show up under “paid social”
2. Inside the “Social Analytics” Page (Agorapulse Social ROI)
Back to Social Media ROI dashboards inside Agorapulse: we use data Google Analytics sends us to feed our dashboards. This means that the traffic showing up under tables like “Funnel by Source” can include both paid and organic, depending on the company’s UTM tracking choices.
Our ability to differentiate between paid and organic will depend on that specific company’s tracking decisions: namely to track all links using a “medium” UTM and tag paid social posts as medium = “paid”.
In that scenario, “paid” will be filtered out from the traffic, event and revenue data categorised as “social”. It will be classified as “paid social” inside GA. Because ROI dashboards are pre-filtered on organic social exclusively, social posts with a “utm_medium = paid” won’t show up in any of Social ROI graphs and tables.
This is true for all graphs and tables: Funnels by conversion events, campaign, landing page or source.
3. Inside the “Your Social ROI” Page (Agorapulse Social ROI)
All the data in the “Your Social ROI” pages are based on content published with Agorapulse. Because Agorapulse only supports the publication of organic content, any data in the “Your Social ROI” dashboards is exclusively organic, irrespective of the UTM parameters you use. As an extreme example, a post tagged with a “utm_medium = paid” will still show up under “Your Social ROI” or “Content” pages, because despite its UTM tag, it was published with Agorapulse (and is therefore necessarily organic content).
By the same logic, traffic and conversions data generated by boosted posts originally published from Agorapulse will also show up in the “Your Social ROI” and “Content” pages.