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Google Analytics and Aquisition from Social Media


I have some difficulty with interpreting the difference between some of the traffic coming from social media.

What is the difference between these source/mediums:

Facebook

  • facebook.com / referral
  • l.facebook.com / referral
  • m.facebook.com / referral
  • lm.facebook.com / referral
  • business.facebook.com / referral
  • web.facebook.com / referral
  • touch.facebook.com / referral
  • mobile.facebook.com / referral
  • apps.facebook.com / referral
  • facebook / (not set)
  • facebook / ads
  • Facebookads / Facebook

Google

  • google / organic
  • google.com / referral
  • mail.google.com / referral
  • tpc.googlesyndication.com / referral

Twitter

  • twitter.com / referral
  • twitter.com / social
  • twitterfeed / twitter

Some clarification would help me a lot. Thanks in advance!


Solution

  • Facebook
    m, mobile, touch: from mobile web client
    l, lm: has something to do with external links from Facebook to you. They route through a subdomain to remove personal information from the URL before forwarding to an external domain. You can google link shimming for more info.
    apps: Obviously, coming from a facebook app - like games and stuff.
    business: From business page.
    ads, ads: From various Facebook ads. People might be manually tagging these with GA parameters.

    Google
    Organic: From Search results
    Referral: From Google Plus and Google (groups posts, help articles, etc... from google.com domain)
    Mail: from gmail or inbox, probably from an ad?
    tpc.googlesyndication.com: Google Doubleclick ad clicks

    Twitter
    Referral: From normal Twitter.
    Social: Just from normal Twitter. It's weird you'd see this in source/medium, though. You probably manually tagged a link with this information. Usually it'd say t.co / referral.
    Twitterfeed: A social sharing app that automatically tags links for GA