Campaign source showing traffic prior to first use - Google Analytics

[James Taylor]

We have a weekly industry news newsletter in which we have just implemented custom campaign tracking.

Under Acquisitions -> Campaigns we see a flat line at zero and then a spike for this week's data. However, having created a custom segment where the source exactly matches the campaign name, we then see historical weekly spikes on the day the newsletter is usually sent.

We're certain that the campaign name hasn't been used before, so where is GA getting this historical data from?

Thanks.

[dcarlbom]

Hey James,

I would believe that one option could be that you've gone with including Users and not Sessions in the segment?
If the segment is set to Users instead, there's a possibility that the segments will include older data if some users visited you guys prior to the campaign.

BR Daniel Carlbom

[James Taylor]

Thank you - this has given better looking data. Am I to understand from this then, that if I filter on users, GA is somehow tracking users who have previously clicked a newsletter link?

[RhinoFish]

Yep, previous visitors.

It does get confusing, read these:
[support.google.com...]
[support.google.com...]

We sometimes make the opposite mistake.
We know we stopped using a certain utm tag value, but people are showing up with sessions with that value.
Far too many for it to have been bookmarked. :-)
If a repeat visitors arrives via direct type in, their utm tags are subject to attribution - if they have a previous visit from an old utm tag, and this visit has a null value for that tag, we see reported User data with the earlier tag.
The Analytics cookie is only 90 days though, so it disappears later.

Sorry, my example here is not the issue you are having, hope I didn't make it more confusing.

If a user had 15 visits, then bought something, you already know the "campaign" for that sale would be the most recent (non-null) utm value, it wouldn't list all 15 varying utm values.
Same thing applies to Users, your segment is pulling them because their most recent "campaign" value is the new name.
But they have previous visits / sessions before they clicked on this recently utm-named link.

Dang, reading my answer, I'm not helping... he's off in the weeds again, somebody go pull Pat back to the road, he's covered in thorns... :-)