I post on Snapchat for free and also run Snapchat ads. How do I keep paid ad visits apart from ordinary story visits in my reports?

Why the source alone is not enough

Tag both links with source snapchat and medium social and your report shows one Snapchat number. The ad may look like a hit while it is really taking credit for orders from long-time followers who came through your stories, or the other way round. The decision you care about, raise the ad budget or stop it, needs the ad's number on its own.

The medium field exists for exactly this: it describes the kind of channel, not its name. So the source stays fixed and the medium changes with how the visitor got there.

The two links side by side

Product page https://example.com/oud, campaign eid_2026 in both cases. In the UTM campaign link builder we kept the same source and campaign and changed only the medium:

https://example.com/oud?utm_source=snapchat&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=eid_2026

https://example.com/oud?utm_source=snapchat&utm_medium=paid_social&utm_campaign=eid_2026

The only difference is utm_medium. In your report, the eid_2026 campaign row adds the two together, and splitting it by medium puts stories on one line and the ad on another.

Which value to use for the paid medium

There is no single official word everyone follows. Some analytics tools sort visits into groups such as paid social automatically, based on the medium value, and values like paid_social or cpc are common for that. Before you settle on a name, open your analytics tool's settings or help pages and check how it groups medium values, then use the same name on every ad.

1. Open the builder and paste the offer page URL.
2. Type snapchat as the source and eid_2026 as the campaign.
3. Type social as the medium and copy the link for your stories.
4. Change the medium to paid_social and copy the second link into your ad in Ads Manager.
5. If you run several ads, add a content value to each, such as video_a and video_b.

After the campaign: did the ad pay off?

Take the number of orders from the paid_social medium in your report, and the spend, impressions and clicks from Ads Manager. Put them into the Campaign performance calculator to get cost per click, cost per order and conversion rate. Leave the free story orders out of this sum: they would have come without the spend.

Expect your analytics numbers and the ad platform's numbers to differ somewhat, since each counts in its own way. Compare each source with itself over time rather than expecting the two figures to match.