Tracking social media ad traffic in Google Analytics

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  Michael Martinez: Well, the simplest hack I can think of is to set up your own redirects through another domain, but that means visitors will probably be clicking through 2-3 redirects depending on the social media platform. If you`re already using a URL shortener that`s another redirect but some of them offer tracking.
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  David Kutcher: Custom Channel Groupings in Google Analytics, coupled with UTM strings on your URL shares. This article I wrote should help: https://www.confluentforms.com/.../utm-best-practices.html
  
  Basically what you`d do is add the UTM like so:
  medium: cpc (not social in this case!)
  source: facebook
  
  You`d then create a custom channel grouping that is looking for that combination and call it "Paid Social"; that way it shows up in your channels as its own channel which you can then compare to social, paid search, organic search, etc.
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  Ashley Sam: Cant i just create a custom channel grouping with a rule as medium=SocialAds
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  Ashley Sam: And all my FB ads will run with utm_medium=SocialAds
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  David Kutcher: you can do that, but wouldn`t you want to see a grouping of all of your Paid traffic in a report, and a grouping of all of your Facebook traffic in a report?
  
  the advantage of my method is that you get the best of all worlds ;)
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  Ashley Sam: David Kutcher uhm, kinda lost you. Can you elaborate.
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  David Kutcher: Sure. If you change the medium via UTMs to be "SocialAds", that means your inbound traffic from those links won`t show up in the Social Media channel anymore. And unless you create a new Channel looking for SocialAds as the medium, it will show up as (Other) in your Acquisition Channels report.
  
  Because the medium is SocialAds, it will also not show up in your "paid traffic" report because the medium is not "cpc", so you won`t be able to easily compare your different paid sources of traffic (you`ll have to do a combination report).
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  Ashley Sam: David Kutcher Ok thats fine.
  
  So if i create a custom channel grouping , it will show up in the report right. Where my custom channel rule is medium=SocialAds .
  
  And im going to ask you another question. Say I dont use any UTM parameter in my FB ads, based on your "Because the medium is SocialAds, it will also not show up in your "paid traffic" report " line, are you suggesting that FB ad data automatically populates in "paid traffic"channel and not "social" channel
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  David Kutcher: Ashley Sam I could be wrong in this regard, but I`m fairly certain that Facebook defaults to medium=cpc source=facebook for paid ads.
  
  But no, I`m saying that because you`re manipulating the medium away from "cpc" in your Analytics, that you`ll now have a separation between them when looking at all CPC information within Analytics.