An Analytics Horror Story: using UTMs to track internal campaigns

As any horror movie, things look peaceful and innocent at the beginning.

It starts with a simple:

Hey, we're adding some banners of that new campaign on our site today. Don't worry, I'm adding all UTMs we need to track the results.

And that’s when you realize that things are not ok and everyone’s going to die.

So, what's the problem with using UTMs to track internal campaigns?

You may think that this is not a big deal, after all, UTMs are the good guys, right? They help us understand where our users are coming from and efficiently measure the results of our campaigns. If you're not familiar with UTMs, here's how they look like:

olx.pt/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc

Where utm_source is the name of the website/platform where the user is coming from and utm_medium is the "marketing medium" used (could be a newsletter, banner, and many others). You could also have UTMs to distinguish campaigns, keywords or content. Check this Google article if you want to know more.

So UTMs are some kind of "good snitches" that tell us everything we need to know where our users are coming.

And then if you think about it, that's why you can't use UTMs to track internal campaign. Because they were made to track external traffic and not internal.

Here're the consequences of using UTMs to track internal campaigns:

You lose the "real" traffic source of your visitors

When a user clicks on an internal banner with UTM parameters that will automatically rewrite your source, medium, campaign and whatever you had about that user.

Let's say you acquire a user on an Adwords campaign. If that same user comes back to your site and then clicks on one of your internal banners with UTMs, that information will be lost and now he'll be attributed to your internal campaign and not Adwords anymore. So much for CAC calculations.

You will inflate your sessions

Another problem with this is that you'll artificially increase your number of sessions as each click on a link with UTMS is interpreted as a new session from a GA's perspective.

Bounce rate for external visitor grow artificially

If you come directly from an external campaign and click on an internal link with UTMs, your previous session will be considered as bounced and a new session will start.

The alternative?

Try ITMs instead. ITMs are like UTMs, but they're exclusively for internal campaigns. There is some setup you need to do, of course, but after you do it you're Analytics will be way more accurate.

Bonus problem: should email campaigns be tracked with UTMs or ITMs?

I'd love to hear it from you!

My opinion? It depends:

• If it's a newsletter for active users you should use ITMs (I don't wanna lose the true source of those visitors);
• If it's a reactivation email to inactive users I'd use UTMs (as it would almost like an acquisition campaign);
• You get the idea.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this, leave a comment below, especially if you disagree :)

See u next time!