Google Analytics Integration & Marketing Channel Filters
You can filter your Lifetime Value report by marketing channel and source/medium combinations. You can find them under the Filters in the Lifetime Value report, as shown below:
📚 In order to see data for the filters connect Lifetimely to Google Analytics. Learn more here.
In this article, we are going to explain what's happening under the hood, and how we match the Google Analytics channels from the UTM tags.
Definitions
The marketing channel and source/medium data are pulled from your Google Analytics account, which uses UTM-tags for recording the sources and mediums of your site visitors. UTM-tags are the various strings you (hopefully) add to your Facebook ads into the URL-parameters field.
Lifetimely pulls these source/medium combinations into Lifetimely and populates that raw data to the Source/Mediums filters. The marketing channel filters are then determined based on the Source/Medium combinations, as shown below:
| GA Source | GA Medium | Lifetimely’s Channel |
| affiliate, affiliates | - | Affiliates |
| IS NOT any of the following: bing, msn, yahoo, gemini, facebook, instagram, pinterest, twitter, tiktok, snapchat | cpc, ppc, paidsearch | CPC Google |
| direct | - | Direct |
| email, e-mail | ||
| facebook, fb | cpc, ppc, paid_social, paidsocial, paid social, ocpm | Facebook Paid |
| Instagram, igshopping | cpc ppc, paid_social, paidsocial, paid social, referral | |
| - | organic | Organic Search |
| pinterest, snapchat, twitter, tiktok | cpc, ppc, paid_social, paid-social, paid social, paidsocial | Other Social Advertising |
| IS NOT any of the following:facebook, instagram, pinterest, twitter, tiktok | referral | Referral |
| facebook, instagram, pinterest, twitter, tiktok | social, social-network, social-media, sm, social network, social media, referral | Social |
Why not use the default Google Analytics' channels? Because they don't really tell you much if you're running a lot of paid traffic from Facebook and other social networks as their traffic is usually labeled as "Referral" in Google Analytics.
First Touch vs Last Touch
There are two kinds of filters for the marketing data: first touch and last touch.
- The first touch means customers first click (=visit) into your store.
- The last touch equals customers' last click before making an order with you.
For example, a customer finds your through a Facebook Ad but doesn't convert on their first visit to your store. Later, they search for your product in Google Shopping and place an order. Now the first touch channel filter will attribute the order for Paid Facebook (if you've tagged your ads) and the last touch filter for CPC Google.
What's Next?
Some example questions you can answer with these filters:
- Is my cold prospecting traffic from Facebook Ads more valuable than from Google Shopping?
- What's our true ROAS for acquisition campaigns?