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How to use UTM parameters to grow your audience

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Re: How to use UTM parameters to grow your audience

#11

Post by redis_mlc »

monadic2 wrote: post #7

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/utm-tracking-... I have never observed a “utm” query param actually improve the quality of the response. We all know why this obviously positive functionality isn’t built into the browser: because browser vendors rely on hostile business practices to survive. Still no technology to transact with the site you’re visiting for their content....

> I have never observed a “utm” query param actually improve the quality of the response.

You have it backwards. It's more tracking for the webmaster/marketer to know what was popular and what wasn't.

Re: How to use UTM parameters to grow your audience

#12

Post by [deleted] »

medius wrote: post #10
kirillzubovsky wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's really useful! It's actually surprising that something like this doesn't come as a default with Mailchimp forms. Just forked it and will give it a try. Thank you!

You can also check out https://github.com/medius/utm_form which can handle a lot of use cases. (Disclosure: I created this to help my customers at https://www.terminusapp.com )

[deleted]

Re: How to use UTM parameters to grow your audience

#14

Post by hnick »

kirillzubovsky wrote: post #4
gk1 wrote: post #3

“Grow your audience” is a stretch here. Better to say “...to see where traffic comes from.” If you want to go a step further and see which traffic sources lead to form completions (like newsletter or app signups), I made a utility that captures UTM parameters and then inserts them into any form submitted during that session: https://github.com/gkogan/sup-save-url-parameters

That's really useful! It's actually surprising that something like this doesn't come as a default with Mailchimp forms. Just forked it and will give it a try. Thank you!

I'm pretty sure I saw this somewhere in one of the other marketing automation tools but yes it's definitely not common.

Kind of related, I saw a webinar by Ontraport recently and they were going a step further by saving google analytics IDs against contacts for deep funnel conversion tracking. The idea is they don't really care about who signs up for a free trial, they want to know who upgrades to paid within the trial period and usually the attribution is all messed up by then or they don't know who is who. So saving details and manually calling google will help to track this.

It seems there are still a lot of little tricks out there that aren't standard practice.

Re: How to use UTM parameters to grow your audience

#15

Post by stanislavb »

petercooper wrote: post #2

I run a newsletter company with almost 500k subscribers. When I started out 10 years ago, I was a fan of Google Analytics so added these parameters to all links in my newsletters. This was uncommon at the time and it turned out to have a huge impact on our growth as lots of webmasters were glued to their analytics at the time, wondered who we were, and Googled the name of our newsletters! I got emails or tweets every…

Thanks Peter, I'm wondering, why did you stop using UTM params?

Re: How to use UTM parameters to grow your audience

#16

Post by monadic2 »

redis_mlc wrote: post #11
monadic2 wrote: post #7

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/utm-tracking-... I have never observed a “utm” query param actually improve the quality of the response. We all know why this obviously positive functionality isn’t built into the browser: because browser vendors rely on hostile business practices to survive. Still no technology to transact with the site you’re visiting for their content....

> I have never observed a “utm” query param actually improve the quality of the response. You have it backwards. It's more tracking for the webmaster/marketer to know what was popular and what wasn't.

Yes, and despite being easily strippable this functionality is preserved, intentionally, by browsers.

Re: How to use UTM parameters to grow your audience

#17

Post by redis_mlc »

gk1 wrote: post #5
kirillzubovsky wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's really useful! It's actually surprising that something like this doesn't come as a default with Mailchimp forms. Just forked it and will give it a try. Thank you!

I’ve used multiple marketing platforms, some costing $xx,000/year, and still haven’t seen this feature.

Well, those parameters are intended for GA to parse, so there's several reasons for analytics competitors to not add those:

1) they make it easier for the marketer to setup campaigns with a paid competitor, and then drop the subscription for that software and monitor them with GA only

2) they make GA top-of-mind for marketers every time they look at a link with UTM in it, even in somebody else's marketing dashboard (free advertising for GA)

3) GA gets to collect campaign data, freeriding on the analytics competitor

Re: How to use UTM parameters to grow your audience

#19

Post by gk1 »

medius wrote: post #10
kirillzubovsky wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's really useful! It's actually surprising that something like this doesn't come as a default with Mailchimp forms. Just forked it and will give it a try. Thank you!

You can also check out https://github.com/medius/utm_form which can handle a lot of use cases. (Disclosure: I created this to help my customers at https://www.terminusapp.com )

Nice product. I came across it recently when researching other accessible methods for capturing UTM parameters. Yours was the only other one I found.

Re: How to use UTM parameters to grow your audience

#20

Post by hbcondo714 »

I came across another article[1] on this and they state to "Never use UTM parameters on internal links (e.g., homepage sliders, internal banners, or internal links on blog posts). Clicking on those internal links will cause the current session to end and a new session to start—attributing the new session to the source/medium used on the internal link."

[1] https://cxl.com/blog/utm-parameters/

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