Edit: There is more information on this in the Google Analytics 4 How-To-Guide in your Vici shared drive in the Google Analytics folder or ask your Trainer for a copy.
Google Analytics isn’t really a tracking system – it is designed to give you broad strokes in understanding how your website visitors behave on your site. If you try to use it as an ad tracker it will let you down. It does not register clicks the way the exchange servers do. An exchange will record a click as a click no matter how long someone stays on the page and where they go after it. Google Analytics records clicks only if a person stays on the page a certain amount of time. So what you will find is that the number of clicks for a campaign that GA shows will always be different from what the exchange reports (what we send on to you each week) will show. This is true no matter what buying platform someone uses – even the Google display network.
You can put UTM codes on all your creative but it is redundant. The monthly exchange reporting that we send you breaks out everything by individual ad creative. The UTM codes are helpful for when you are doing things like for example a blog post and you want to track that traffic. If you really want to do UTM codes on every piece of creative we can do it, but may make your GA reports more confusing.
See this FAQ as well: https://support.vicimediainc.com/qa_faqs/problems-with-utm-codes-google-analytics/
IF YOU NEED A MORE DETAILED EXPLANATION… http://www.vicimediainc.com/dont-click-reports-match-google-analytics/
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