link?, link, t.co, and tw domains coming through referral channels

[adobeexplorer1]

I have been seeing link?, link, t.co, and tw domains within referral domains channel. I am curious if you guys have seen these domains and could show me best practices on classifying these between paid and organic. 

Also, I could be wrong but are organic channels only possible to end with .com only? 

Best, 

[Michael_Wills]

Organic traffic can originate from any domain (not just .com). Take for example facebook.com. Organic traffic could originate from there, if someone shares a link to your site and someone clicks on it. Alternatively, paid traffic might also originate from facebook.com as well, if an ad is placed on that platform that links to your site and someone clicks on that ad.

The t.co domain is used by twitter when links are shared/posted on that platform for the reasons outlined below by Twitter.

Take for example this tweet

https://twitter.com/_EverybodysHome/status/1617092833931845633

If you hover your mouse over the tweet, you'll see at the bottom of your browser that the URL is a t.co URL.

RE: the .tw domain, I'm not aware of any particular service that uses that domain - but yes, it's entirely possible that it could be organic traffic. Visit one of the domains or google the particular domain to see if you can see what it actually is.

RE: link... are you referring to .link or does the word 'link' form another part of the URL?

[Jennifer_Dungan · Accepted solution]

To expand on this just a little... the fundamental difference between "paid" and "organic" would be that the first one is a paid campaign (Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc all have mechanism by which to promote your own content on the platform for an extra cost)... these should be appended with a campaign code that specifically indicates this as being paid.

Organic on the other hand would be content that is crawled and shows up in the normal search results on Google, or content that has been shared by users on social media, or shared by internal staff to their personal social media pages, etc... no one is paying to promote these links... they are just shared to the platform, and seen by users who get those feeds (or who see the feeds for the re-post/re-tweet/etc).

This is why people often have Paid and Organic (or Natural) Search, as well as Paid and Organic Social Media, etc... since users can come from these sources in different contexts (paid and not paid campaigns), but your business definitely wants to watch their paid campaigns a lot closer to see if the money they are spending to drive traffic is worth it. 

[adobeexplorer1]

Hi Jennifer! Thanks so much for replying and expanding this question. Segmenting paid and organic social is definitely something we would love to have moving forward, but there is some parameters we have not been confirm as paid as they are missing the any campaign ids. But I could be wrong? I also answered to Michael's answer above and hopefully that can help provide more answers .

[Jennifer_Dungan]

You can definitely add some custom identifiers to your campaigns as needed... it should be noted that things like Google Ads tend to add default tags like utm_medium=cpc (cost per click) and other utm parameters (and why wouldn't they, these are the campaign parameters that Google Analytics processes by default, and these all fall under the Google architecture)

But it means you might be able to start leveraging that if those already exist. But you will need to process that data to get it into Adobe the way you want to see it.

[adobeexplorer1]

Hi Michael! First, thank so much for the response!! I appreciate it so much!

To answer the question the "link" and "link?" is what shows up as parameters under marketing channel detail. (See the image below).

 But when I breakdown by entry URL for these to see those Landing Page URLs + parameters, they show up like these.

• URL?socid=?link 
  URL?socid=link

Whereas we have also seen "fb" - and when I break down by entry URL i see some examples like below: 

• URL?socid=fb (note:ends with fb, no code)
• URLsocid=fbcp&fbclid=iwar0zo2wN (note: the numbers after = are an example not the actual id)

- Normally we see fbcp  when it is a facebook campaign, but im unsure of the fb as more URLs like the fb example bucketing under "fb" marketing channel detail. However, none of the team's social campaign ids are matching with the rest of the numbers after fb=cp. Therefore, I'm curious if the "socid" in the entry URLs would signify this is in fact a campaign? 

The client would like us to measure the paid and organic traffic but we are still investigating into how these fb and link parameters shown are coming up. I wonder if there is a step in the process missing that is causing the parameters to come with no campaign codes. Any suggestions or guidance would be incredibly helpful.

[Jennifer_Dungan]

The fbclid=iwar0zo2wN is added automatically by facebook for their own purposes.. this is a facebook click id, I believe that they might use this in conjunction with their FB Pixel tracking, and possibly keep track of their paid and organic drivers....

While you could track the fbclid, you won't have any real point of reference as to what it means, and it won't really tie into your own social campaign tracking that your internal team is doing.... It might be possible to get an export from FB for their fbclid that would allow you to make deeper data connections to your FB pixels (but I don't know if that would really be a factor for your Marketing Channels)

I see you posted an example:

URL?socid=?link 

FYI, you should never have multiple ? in a URL... this is bad... URL structures support only a single ?.. the second ? will always be treated as literal text

You might want to check out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2w8KjeRkSQ to see common campaign tracking issues and steps to resolve them.

It looks like you are also getting a literal "link" value passed to your social campaign.. this seems like maybe you need to get some better controls in place for your campaigns (full disclosure, this is something a lot of companies struggle with... and we are currently trying to get under control in my company, so you are not alone in your pain)