Ads and campaigns

Sources answers the questions behind any ad budget: how much of your traffic and revenue comes from ads, which campaigns earn their spend, and who ends up buying.

Channels

Sources opens on Channels. Every visit is sorted into one channel from the link it arrived on:

Channel	Typical traffic
Paid social	Meta, TikTok, Pinterest, LinkedIn and X ads
Paid search	Google and Microsoft ads
Display & other paid	Display networks and other tagged paid traffic
Email & SMS	Newsletters and flows from your email tool
Partners & affiliates	Influencers, affiliates and brand partnerships
AI assistants	ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and similar
Organic social	Unpaid posts and shares
Organic search	Google and other search results
Referral	Links from other websites
Other campaigns	Tagged links that fit none of the above
Direct	Typed addresses, bookmarks and untagged links

The cards at the top total the three paid channels: sessions, orders and revenue from ads, and their share of everything. The bar below compares each channel’s share of visits with its share of revenue. A channel with a much bigger share of revenue than of visits is bringing buyers.

The table puts the commercial numbers first: Orders, Revenue, Conversion and Revenue / session. Compare revenue per session with what a click costs in the ad platform. More metrics adds the browsing measures, such as cube depth and newsletter signups. Revenue is hidden when your Space sells in more than one currency. Orders and conversion still show.

Drilling into a campaign

Select any row to open its page. Every page looks the same, whether it is a channel, a campaign or a single ad:

The path at the top, such as All channels › Paid social › facebook. Select any part of it to go back to that level.
Sessions, orders, revenue, and Bought on a later visit: visitors who did not buy on this visit but came back and bought later.
What is inside it, one level down. Paid traffic goes Channel → Source → Campaign → Ad set / keyword → Ad; unpaid channels open by the referring site. Select a row to keep going.
By landing cube switches the table to the cubes these visits started on, with the same orders and revenue. It shows whether a weak campaign is sending people to a cube that does not sell. At the bottom of the path, such as a single ad, Direct or one referring site, the page shows landing cubes. Select a cube to open it in Entry points.
See who buys opens Demographics for the visits that bought, and See sessions opens Sessions, both filtered to this page.

A row called (not set) collects visits without that tag, for example ads whose links carry a campaign but no ad set. A large one means the tagging is incomplete.

This visit or the first one

Shoppers often see an ad, leave, and come back days later by typing your address. The switch at the top changes who gets the credit:

This visit’s source credits each visit to where it came from. The return visit and its order count as Direct.
Visitor’s first source credits every visit and order to the source that first brought the visitor. The order counts for the ad.

Comparing the two shows how much of your direct and search traffic your ads started.

Tagging ads so they show up

Google and Microsoft ads are recognised without extra tags. A Meta ad needs UTM tags, or it is not counted as an ad. Give whoever runs your ads this mapping:

Tag	Put in
`utm_source`	The platform, such as `facebook` or `google`
`utm_medium`	`paid_social` or `cpc`
`utm_campaign`	The campaign name
`utm_term`	The ad set or keyword
`utm_content`	The ad

In Meta, set the URL parameters to utm_source={{site_source_name}}&utm_medium=paid_social&utm_campaign={{campaign.name}}&utm_term={{adset.name}}&utm_content={{ad.name}}.

Age, gender and interests stay in the ad platform. Naming ad sets after their audience and putting that name in utm_term lets you compare audiences by orders in Sources.