Interpreting your GA4 reports #13: Campaigns

How does campaign data differ from other traffic source data?

Campaigns are a way for you to classify the traffic that hits your website in a way that makes sense to you and the type of marketing your org does.

The source and medium dimensions are universal, every visit will have one as GA4 will automatically try to assign these. Campaign names are different, you need to specify the campaign name yourself by setting the value of utm_campaign in the URL of the traffic you’re sending to your website. Click here for GA4’s URL builder.

What campaign conventions should I use?

The bigger your org, the more important it becomes to have a consistent, meaningful naming convention for your campaigns — and the harder that is. Below are some things you might want to consider when creating a convention:

Do you operate in multiple geographic regions and if so should that be in the campaign name?
For ads, should the ad platform be in the campaign name so that a list of campaigns breaks things out between (say) Google and Meta?
Are you doing reporting based on campaign objectives, business units or product/service lines that you want reflected in the campaign?

We recommend you avoid spaces and special characters in campaign names as sometimes these can be rendered incorrectly in the URL meaning the wrong value will come through in your reports.

How can I implement these?

Whatever you decide on, it can be good to create a universal spreadsheet that takes people through the above. You can use data validation to create dropdowns for people to select from, to ensure the convention is followed. There are also 3rd party tools that can help larger orgs manage their UTM tags.

For implementing campaign names, you should also look at the specific marketing tools you are using to see what their automatic UTM tagging conventions are. For example:

For Google Ads, as long as you have auto-tagging enabled, your campaign name will match what you put in the ad platform interface.
For Microsoft Ads, this is also true if you have UTM tagging enabled
For Meta Ads, there is a variable called {{campaign.name}} you can use, but note that it will always be filled with the first value of your campaign, so if you rename a campaign this will start to diverge.
Most email platforms will set the campaign to be whatever you call your specific EDM campaign. However some (eg. Mailchimp) will set it to the name of your list.