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 naming no campaign 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.

Left undetected, those clicks are routed by whichever campaign shares that landing page and was edited most recently. They may be seeing another campaign's offer, and they are counted against that campaign. Nothing about it looks wrong.

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.

#An organic click is not a paid click

A visitor who found your page in search still gets a working button — 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.

Only the arrival that names no campaign has to be decided, and there is no true answer: that visitor belongs to none of them. So the rule is stability rather than correctness — the most recently edited campaign routes them, and the same page resolves the same way on every visit until one of those campaigns is edited.

Which means editing the other campaign changes where organic visitors to that page go. The Landing pages list shows this:

Hover the chip and it names which edit would change it, and what the other campaigns would send visitors to instead. not routed is a real state, not a blank: no live campaign sends traffic to that page, so an organic visitor there is not routed and the button stays inert by design.

If you want two campaigns fully isolated, give each its own landing page URL — even the same page with ?v=b. Then no ambiguity exists at all.

#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.