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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

#51

Post by james_impliu »

cosmie wrote: post #41
shostack wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are you seeing companies solve for view through tracking in this landscape?

From which perspective? For ad networks: the solve seems to be more disclosure from advertisers of customer PII[1]. All of the recent tracking prevention and cookie restriction measures are disruptive to last-mile analytics, but are far less disruptive to the overall strengths of device and identity graphs. Offline/out-of-band data feeds for click-through tracking don't require passing any identity data, since the cl…

This was a big part of the reason we built our repo https://github.com/posthog/posthog to enable first party analytics. It'll grab UTM tags all the way through to individual user behavior in your app and then provides an analytics UX on top. Disclaimer: I'm one of the founders.

Re: How to use UTM parameters to grow your audience

#52

Post by cosmie »

gk1 wrote: post #50
cosmie wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's definitely a really common issue. And correcting internal links when that happens is always a painful process - the artificially inflated site traffic figures it creates have likely been celebrated and publicized internally, and correcting the analytics (and the subsequent drop in traffic stats) gets treated as if you actually killed real traffic to the site in the process.

Does it still get counted as a new session if the domain is an excluded referrer? I thought not. In any case, I agree and these workarounds are never worth the data doubt they introduce. There are ways to track internal flows without utm tags.

That I'm not sure of. My hunch would be

- If you use utm_source=mysite.com by itself it likely would, as the medium would default to referrer and the data sent to GA would be the same as if no explicit parameters were defined.

- If you use utm_medium and set it to anything but referrer, it wouldn't be suppressed. I.e. mysite.com / referrer would get suppressed by the exclusion list and processed as a direct hit, but mysite.com / email would not trigger the exclusion list.

- If you use utm_source=mysite.com, don't use utm_medium (so it defaults to referrer), but leverage other parameters such as utm_campaign, I have no idea how it'd handle that state. I could see it either overriding the exclusion filter due to the explicitly stated campaign, or working like the normal exclusion filter and silently eating the additional utm parameters in the process.

Now I'm curious though - will have to test it out on a dummy property and see what happens!

Re: How to use UTM parameters to grow your audience

#53

Post by mrgreenfur »

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

I made a startup to try and answer one question further: connect incoming traffic to conversion events and assign credit. This is where you'll get a real bottoms-up view of your marketing effectivness.

Re: How to use UTM parameters to grow your audience

#54

Post by duck »

petercooper wrote: post #48
duck wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that is exactly what Peter ended up doing for his newsletters.

We have a redirect so we can measure traffic in aggregate (we don't track who clicks what) to refine our content over time. But.. I don't believe we get set as the referrer the way we do it (30x redirects). I believe this is why Twitter's t.co redirector DOES use a true "dummy page" as then they get the referral. It's something that might be worth trying though..

Ah, okay... that makes sense and is a great setup. Did you run into any issues with spam filters when you made that switch?

Re: How to use UTM parameters to grow your audience

#55

Post by petercooper »

duck wrote: post #54
petercooper wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have a redirect so we can measure traffic in aggregate (we don't track who clicks what) to refine our content over time. But.. I don't believe we get set as the referrer the way we do it (30x redirects). I believe this is why Twitter's t.co redirector DOES use a true "dummy page" as then they get the referral. It's something that might be worth trying though..

Ah, okay... that makes sense and is a great setup. Did you run into any issues with spam filters when you made that switch?

Nope, it's what Mailchimp, etc., do. All the outgoing links just fly through their server on the same hostname. We do the same with our hostname.

I have evidence that Google follows these links though, because if you link to a "bad" site even through a redirector, Google notices and will throw you into spam or say you're phishing, etc :-)

Re: How to use UTM parameters to grow your audience

#56

Post by shostack »

cosmie wrote: post #41
shostack wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are you seeing companies solve for view through tracking in this landscape?

From which perspective? For ad networks: the solve seems to be more disclosure from advertisers of customer PII[1]. All of the recent tracking prevention and cookie restriction measures are disruptive to last-mile analytics, but are far less disruptive to the overall strengths of device and identity graphs. Offline/out-of-band data feeds for click-through tracking don't require passing any identity data, since the cl…

I was actually curious about all of them as I've been both buy and sell side. But I'd like to dig further on the buy side.

I've seen what happens with the consciously accepting route--not pretty. Furthers distrust of a channel many already have inherent concerns and varying degrees of understanding, which is a dangerous combo.

Giving the data is what I suspect many will do unless they have sufficient resources for said legal team and technology, or care a great deal about leaking data.

The last option is interesting. So I've used Snowplow (was actually an early user that sponsored them adding UTM remapping). I'm curious how you approached using it as a poor-man's ad server with Cloudfront which I'm less familiar with. Are there any technical write-ups you could point me to?

Re: How to use UTM parameters to grow your audience

#57

Post by shostack »

james_impliu wrote: post #51
cosmie wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From which perspective? For ad networks: the solve seems to be more disclosure from advertisers of customer PII[1]. All of the recent tracking prevention and cookie restriction measures are disruptive to last-mile analytics, but are far less disruptive to the overall strengths of device and identity graphs. Offline/out-of-band data feeds for click-through tracking don't require passing any identity data, since the cl…

This was a big part of the reason we built our repo https://github.com/posthog/posthog to enable first party analytics. It'll grab UTM tags all the way through to individual user behavior in your app and then provides an analytics UX on top. Disclaimer: I'm one of the founders.

But can you do anything about view-through data?
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