21–30 of 57 posts
This garbage breaks the UX of the internet.
“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
I occasionally change them to something random, like "potato_world_weekly_back_cover". Figure it might provide a little entertainment to bored marketeers.
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.
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…
Just to add to Peter's comment, the one issue with links via email/newsletters is that they show up as 'direct' traffic with no referral, so they are about impossible to link back to anything w/o the utm params.
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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 tri…
That said, all of the browsers are becoming so aggressive about cookie management that relying on the Google-set clientID is asking for pain at this point, unless you've implemented something like this[1] cookie setting service/proxy/relay. Creating your own first-party identifier (even if it's just randomly generated the same as the GA clientID) and leveraging the user-id field is far more stable.
> It seems there are still a lot of little tricks out there that aren't standard practice.
Simo Ahava's blog (linked to in [1]) is a wealth of nifty web analytics tricks (primarily focused around Google Tag Manager, Google Analytics, and a sprinkling of Snowplow[2] for the self-hosted crowd). The blog is geared at a less technical audience, but the vast majority of content is around technical nuances of analytics implementations and fairly minor coding adjustments that can be made to significantly enhance a standard implementation.
[1] https://www.simoahava.com/google-cloud/create-cookie-rewrite...
I don't understand why we have to store the entire dataset in the URL, when something like ?utm_id=1 (mapped to the others in some database) would do. It's stuff like this that prevents average users from "getting" URLs; they don't know what UTM is and assume it is important to get to the information. This garbage breaks the UX of the internet.
Right now I can add whatever UTM parameters to any links I send without keying it into a database system, submitting a CR to the IT team, submitting it to Google, or any other nonsense. Details will be collected immediately whether through web logs, google analytics, or something else.
If one email that I send has links to multiple domains (some of which I don't control due to SaaS eating the web) then we'd either have to track and manage multiple IDs which change for each link or use a scary looking GUID generated by a centralised system (no thanks). That sounds like a real headache.
Hiding it behind an ID would make it prettier but it also reduces transparency to the end user of what is being collected. I think if it's going to be there anyway, I'd rather see it.
I don't understand why we have to store the entire dataset in the URL, when something like ?utm_id=1 (mapped to the others in some database) would do. It's stuff like this that prevents average users from "getting" URLs; they don't know what UTM is and assume it is important to get to the information. This garbage breaks the UX of the internet.
You just rarely ever see it because marketing execution is already an operational nightmare at most places (even more so at scale), and the centralized coordination required to leverage the campaign key method introduces a lot of friction, overhead, and potential bottlenecks into processes with little perceived gain. The decentralized model (i.e. entire dataset in the url) is far easier to enforce compliance with between all parties, as you can providing tooling (i.e. a link builder spreadsheet) that allows each party to integrate the usage into their workflows with minimal overhead or ongoing coordination required.
[1] https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/6066741?hl=en
Neat URL is a Chrome extension that automatically removes all that cruft from URLs. Not affiliated with the author, just sick of people like this author littering in my address bar. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/neat-url/jchobbjgi...
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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 tri…
Yea, that combined with the User Activity API is incredibly handy. Especially useful to pull out when some anomaly occurs, and stakeholders suddenly want a particular conversion under the microscope (an unexpected enterprise user, unusually large order value, an unexpectedly frequent recurring customer, etc). That said, all of the browsers are becoming so aggressive about cookie management that relying on the Google-…
Edit: I had a look through that first link, nice hack, but definitely out of reach of most small businesses. That's kind of how these things go, big players have the resources to jump a hurdle without slowing down, everyone else is left behind.