How a visitor was identified

Four things can bring a visitor to a landing page, and UTMCAP records which of them it was on every click. Three are ordinary. The fourth is a fault worth acting on.

#Why orphan matters

Google and Microsoft add gclid and msclkid to the landing page URL themselves. Nobody types them, so nobody can forget them.

An arrival carrying one and no utm_id is therefore not an organic visitor. It is traffic you paid for whose identity was lost between the ad and the page — almost always a plain landing page address in the ad instead of the generated Final URL, or a Final URL edited afterwards.

Those clicks are recorded and routed, so the visitor still reaches your offer and whatever they do there still lands on the campaign. What is missing is their cost: the URL did not name the campaign, so nothing charged them, and the campaign's spend will read low while its clicks read normal. orphan is what tells you which campaign to look at.

The count for the last seven days is on the campaign's Tracking tab whenever it is above zero, with the fix beside it. See parallel tracking.

The page has to carry the campaign tag for any of this to be visible. A Final URL that lost its utm_id, landing on a page whose tag names no campaign, is not recorded at all — there is nothing to name the campaign, so there is no click and no orphan to count. The page would simply be quiet. That is the reason to put the campaign tag on any page only one campaign uses: it is what turns a silent loss into a number you can see.

#An organic click is not a paid click

A visitor who found your page in search still gets a working button, on a page that carries the campaign tag — the tag opens the click, and the reports record it with no traffic source and zero cost.

That matters for your numbers. Billing an organic visitor at the campaign's cost-per-click would invent spend that never happened, and it would do it worst where it hurts most: a page ranking well in search would quietly report as the campaign running away with the budget, and the figures would keep adding up, so nothing would look wrong until a real decision was made on them.

Organic clicks do count towards your plan's monthly click allowance. Every click costs storage and processing whether or not you bought it.

#When two campaigns share a lander

Ordinary — the same pre-sell page behind a Google campaign and a push campaign. Paid traffic is never ambiguous, because utm_id names its own campaign, and each campaign's visitors reach that campaign's own offer.

The arrival that names no campaign belongs to none of them, and UTMCAP no longer picks one for it. Nothing is recorded and the button stays inert. Use the universal tag on a shared page: it is the honest answer, because there is no fact on that page that says which campaign a visitor with no utm_id came for.

UTMCAP used to decide it anyway, by matching the page's address and handing the visitor to whichever campaign sharing it had been edited most recently. That kept the button alive, but it mixed one campaign's bought clicks with everyone who merely found the page, and editing an unrelated campaign silently moved where those visitors went. A page that wants its own visitors attributed now says so, with the campaign tag, and only one campaign can claim a page that way.

So there are two clean shapes, and you pick per page:

If you want two campaigns fully isolated, give each its own landing page URL — even the same page with ?v=b. Then each page has one owner and can carry that campaign's own tag.

#Reading it in reports

arrival is recorded on the arrival row only. The click-out from a lander to an offer is a second row for the same visitor and leaves it empty, so counting arrivals never has to exclude click-outs.

Clicks recorded before this existed read as unknown rather than being folded into one of the four. The screens say so instead of guessing.