Ads and campaigns

Visits from an ad you paid for are channels of their own, next to search engines, social media and the rest:

• Search ads: an ad in a search engine, such as Google Ads or Microsoft Ads on Bing.
• Social ads: an ad on social media, such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X, Reddit, Snapchat or Pinterest.
• Other ads: a banner on another site, a video ad (Google’s ads on YouTube too), a native ad, an ad network, or an ad whose place nothing tells.

You find them under Channels on the Overview and in Reports, at the source of each visit in Visitors, and in the sentence about your period. Click one to filter the whole dashboard: Sources then shows which network sold the ads, and Campaigns which campaign brought them.

Each network is one source

The channel says where an ad was shown; the source says who you bought it from. Every paid visit has its ad network as its source, wherever the ad appeared, so all your Google Ads visits are one row under Sources, next to Google for the visits you did not pay for:

Source	Its ads, wherever they were shown
Google Ads	Google search and its search partners, YouTube, Gmail, the Display Network, Performance Max, Discover and apps
Microsoft Ads	Bing and the Bing app, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo search, MSN, Outlook and Microsoft’s Audience Network
Meta Ads	Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, Threads and Meta’s Audience Network
LinkedIn Ads, TikTok Ads, X Ads, Reddit Ads, Snapchat Ads, Pinterest Ads, Quora Ads	Their own app and site
Yandex Direct, Taboola, Outbrain, Criteo, Amazon Ads, Xandr	Their search results, widgets and banners

Nvivio knows the network by the click ID on the first page, else by the ad server the click came through, by utm_source (google, bing, facebook, linkedin…), or by the site the ad was shown on when only that network sells ads there: a paid visit from YouTube is Google Ads. A paid visit from a network Nvivio does not know keeps the site it came from as its source.

So if you only advertise on Google and still see Other ads, Google showed your ad somewhere other than its search results: on YouTube, in Gmail or on another site. Search campaigns include the Display Network unless you switch it off, and Performance Max shows ads everywhere. Filter on the source Google Ads to see all of it together, and on a channel to see each part.

How Nvivio knows a visit came from an ad

A visit counts as an ad when its first page shows one of these:

• A click ID that an ad network adds to the address of every click on an ad: gclid, gbraid, wbraid, gad_source and gad_campaignid (Google Ads), dclid (Google’s display ads), msclkid (Microsoft Ads), yclid (Yandex), li_fat_id (LinkedIn), ttclid (TikTok), twclid (X), ScCid (Snapchat), rdt_cid (Reddit), epik (Pinterest), qclid (Quora) or tblci (Taboola). Google Ads and Microsoft Ads add theirs by themselves (auto-tagging), so those ads count without anything to set up.
• A paid utm_medium: cpc, ppc, cpm, cpv, cpa, sem, display, banner, retargeting, remarketing, sponsored, ad, ads, advertising, adwords, or anything with paid in it, such as paid_social or paidsearch.
• An ad server as the referring site, such as Google’s ad servers for a banner, Taboola, Outbrain or Criteo.

Which of the three channels it becomes:

1. What utm_medium says: with social in it, social ads; with search in it (or sem), search ads; display, banner, cpm, native or video, other ads.
2. Otherwise, where the ad was shown: the referring site is a search engine (search ads), a social network (social ads) or any other site (other ads). An Android app that names itself, such as the Bing app or the Gmail app, counts as its site: an ad in the Bing app is a search ad.
3. Without a referring site (an app’s own browser often sends none), what utm_source names: google or bing are search ads, facebook, fb, instagram, ig, linkedin or tiktok social ads. Then the network of the click ID: gclid and msclkid are search ads, li_fat_id and ttclid social ads.
4. Only cpc or ppc and nothing else: search ads. Anything else paid: other ads.

Google sells no ads in a social feed: a Google ad on YouTube is a video ad, so other ads, unless its utm_medium says social. A Google ad on a news site or in Gmail is another ad too.

The click ID is never kept

A click ID belongs to one click. Nvivio reads it when the visit arrives, decides the channel, and drops it with every other unknown part of the address (Privacy). It is never stored, shown, exported or sent anywhere. What stays is “a paid click from Google Ads”: the channel, and the network as the source.

What does not count as an ad

• fbclid alone. Facebook and Instagram add it to every link people click, also in posts nobody paid for. Give your Meta ads UTM tags (below) and they count as social ads.
• srsltid. Google adds it to its free product listings: that is a search engine, not an ad.
• A link on another page of your own site that carries a click ID along. Only a visit that arrives from somewhere else counts.
• A copied link. Someone clicks your ad, copies the address with its click ID or ad tags, and later clicks it in a document, a spreadsheet or a chat: Excel, Word or OneNote on the web, SharePoint, Google Docs, Sheets or Drive, Slack, Teams, Notion, Confluence, Trello and the like. No ad is shown there, so that visit is a referral from the tool, such as Excel or Google Docs. Gmail and Outlook do show ads, so a click there still counts.

See your campaign names

Campaigns shows the utm_campaign of a visit. Google Ads’ auto-tagging sends only a click ID, so those visits count as search ads but have no campaign name. To see one, add UTM tags to your ads:

• Google Ads: in a campaign’s settings, under Campaign URL options, set the Final URL suffix to utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=spring-sale, with your campaign’s name. utm_campaign={campaignid} gives its number instead. Keep auto-tagging on.
• Microsoft Ads: it can add UTM tags to your ads by itself (auto-tagging in its account settings), with the campaign’s name.
• Meta (Facebook and Instagram): in the ad, under URL parameters, add utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=paid_social, and with Build a URL parameter set utm_campaign to Meta’s dynamic value for the campaign name, so every campaign carries its own.
• LinkedIn, TikTok and others: add utm_source, utm_medium=paid_social and utm_campaign to the ad’s address.

Nvivio keeps utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign, utm_term and utm_content, never more of the address than that.

Visits from before

Ads are channels of their own since 28 October 2026. Older visits with a paid utm_medium or an ad server as referring site moved to their ad channel, in the visits themselves and in the daily totals of the days the raw visits still cover in full. Older visits that only carried a click ID, as Google Ads’ auto-tagging sends, stay under search engine: the click ID was never stored, so nothing tells them apart.

Each network became one source on 30 October 2026. Older paid visits moved to their network in the same way, as did Google’s ads on YouTube to other ads, and visits from an Android app to that app’s site (the Gmail app is Gmail). A paid visit from a news site that only carried a click ID keeps that site as its source. Older paid visits from a document, sheet or chat tool became referrals the same day, and visits from Google Docs or Drive no longer count as a search engine.

In the API and MCP

The channels are paid_search, paid_social and paid_other in GET /v1/sites/{site}/breakdown?dimension=channel, in visits and in the MCP server. Each row of a breakdown by channel also has label, the channel’s name in the language you ask for (?lang=nl or Accept-Language), such as “Search ads” or “Zoekadvertenties”: AI assistants and the Looker Studio connector show that name, and a CSV of the Channels report has it too. Filter with channel:paid_search, or channel:!paid_search for everything else.

The source of a paid visit is its network’s host: ads.google.com (Google Ads), ads.microsoft.com (Microsoft Ads), adsmanager.facebook.com (Meta Ads), ads.linkedin.com, ads.tiktok.com, ads.x.com, ads.reddit.com, ads.snapchat.com, ads.pinterest.com, ads.quora.com, direct.yandex.com, taboola.com, outbrain.com, criteo.com, advertising.amazon.com or adnxs.com (Xandr). Filter with referrer:ads.google.com for all your Google Ads visits.