Advanced UTM Tracking
Avoid common mistakes that even the experts make when using utm tracking parameters.
Appending UTM parameters to your marketing campaign URLs can give you great insight in Google Analytics when you later look at performance by channel, source or Ad format. However even great marketers (including KISSmetrics!) can get this wrong, which leads to complications down the line — inviting mistakes, making reports harder to pull and endlessly confusing new / infrequent analytics users. Here are 7 useful tips to help you avoid these issues:
- Source, medium and campaign are mandatory
- all lower case, all the time
- DRY (don’t repeat yourself)
- Don’t get too specific with utm_medium
- Good parameters ask questions
- Use utm_term for non-search traffic?
- Keep it consistent
1. Source, medium and campaign are mandatory
If Google Analytics doesn’t see a utm_source in your URL, it won’t even look for the others, so put this one in first. This should almost always be the name of the referring website. So for example ‘msn.com’, ‘facebook.com’, ‘newsletter’, or ‘criteo’ to give an example of an Ad network that can’t tell you what site you’re appearing on.
After source, Google Analytics then attempts to find a campaign and medium — if it finds both, it’ll record that information. Content and term are optional, but useful parameters to use (more on this later).
2. all lower case, all the time
One annoying issue that you’ll quickly notice digging through many accounts is mixed use of upper and lower case. Use all lower case, all the time. Unceremoniously shame anyone caught using uppercase… trust me it saves all sorts of headaches and complications.
3. DRY (dont repeat yourself)
Good advice generally (and a mantra amongst programmers), you should never be repeating yourself within your tags. It’s unnecessary, makes reports difficult to read and confuses people.
Don’t do what Twitter does: ‘https://twitter.com/2michaeltaylor/status/410873192593375232/photo/1/large?utm_source=fb&utm_medium=fb&utm_campaign=2michaeltaylor&utm_content=410873192593375232’
4. Don’t get too specific with utm_medium
One of the most common mistakes I see is improper use of utm_medium. This parameter should give the context of the Ad placement and should be fairly high level, like the provided defaults: ‘cpc’ (paid search), ‘organic’ (organic search), ‘referral’ and ‘direct’. I often see examples like ‘utm_medium=banner300' which is too specific, or ‘utm_medium=paid’ which is much too broad.
Suggestions: ‘banner’ (display), ‘post’ (social), ‘email’, ‘affiliate’ and ‘video’
You should never use ‘cpc’ or ‘organic’ for anything other than search, but you should consider splitting out paid and organic for other channels so you can easily report on paid marketing effectiveness. One example would be using ‘sponsored’ for any promoted posts on Facebook instead of ‘post’. If you’re running display retargeting I’d also consider separating this, because those users will behave completely differently to normal display users (and it’ll help with attribution).
5. Good parameters ask questions
When creating labels for your utm parameters, you should be thinking of them as answers to questions. Nowhere is this more important than with utm_campaign, as it’s the parameter that pulls all other labels together — identifying how your campaign has performed across channels and sources.
With utm_campaign the question you’re answering is “Why am I targeting these sources and (optional) when? You could be sending a targeted email blast, it could be a product launch, or a promotion for Christmas.
Steer clear of campaign names like ‘blogpost’, ‘shoes’ or ‘revenue’.
It adds some overhead, but you might consider adding a date for time-sensitive campaigns — for example adding a date to the campaign for your weekly email allows you to see how many people are still clicking through weeks or month after you sent the email. I recommend the reverse date format (2013-june-23) as it’s comprehendible across countries and makes it easier to filter the data in excel.
Suggestions: ‘newsletter-2013-week-23’, ‘20pc-off-2013-sept-23' or ‘sweepstakes-maldives’.
Note: You should be careful using underscores, as this limits searchability — a search for ‘june’ would surface campaigns tagged as ‘23-june-2013' or ‘2012-june’, but NOT a campaign tagged as ‘june_2013' as this is treated a single string/word by Google (more on dashes vs underscores).
6. Use utm_term for non-search traffic?
Most advice is to never use this for non-search traffic because anything you put here shows up in your keyword reports. However you may want to try using this parameter in certain mediums like email and display to indicate what product SKU or product ID (e.g. product id 1093484) a user clicked on. These numbers are easily ignored or filtered out of keyword reports, and it’s particularly useful if you have an email newsletter containing multiple products — you can now see if users are buying the product they clicked on.
7. Keep it consistent
More important than what naming convention you pick, is to consistently stick with whatever you choose, and enforce it mercilessly. Once recorded, the parameters can never be overwritten or re-recorded so you’re stuck with them. If you make a change you’ll end up with a big discontinuity in your data which will make it difficult to do any year-on-year analysis and increase the likelihood of making a mistake. I advise picking a specific member of the team (if possible) that generates all tracking codes for URLs and maintains them in a spreadsheet. Anyone caught straying gets hung, drawn and quartered.
Contact me on Twitter with any questions / feedback @2michaeltaylor
