What Is A Tracking Parameter?

A tracking parameter is information appended to a URL that provides additional data about the visitor in your preferred web analytics tool. For example, here’s a tagged landing page for a Yahoo Search Marketing campaign.

Original URL:
www.xyz.com

Tagged URL:
www.xyz.com/?utm_source=yahoo&utm_medium=cpc&utm_term=blue%2Bwidget &utm_content=warranty&utm_campaign=widget%2Bcolors

What does this string of data mean?

Campaign Source (utm_source):

In the example the visitor source is from Yahoo. This parameter is supposed to distinguish different sources from the same channel. For paid search it might be Google, Yahoo & Adcenter. A newsletter might separate sources by segment (b2b vs consumer) or websites where you’ve placed the same banner ad.

Campaign Medium (utm_medium):

In the example the visitor arrived from a Yahoo paid search ad (cpc). This parameter designates channels, such as email, banner, blog, affiliates, etc.

Campaign Term (utm_term):

In the example Blue Widget is the keyword being bid on in Yahoo Search Marketing, not to be confused with the visitors actual search query.

Campaign Content (utm_content):

In the example, warranty is a reference to the specific text ad the visitor clicked to arrive at the site. It could also be set to adgroup if you’re not looking for that level of granularity in your pay per click campaign. For an email, you could use this parameter to distinguish the performance of individual links in the message.

Campaign Name (utm_campaign):

In the example, Widget Colors is the campaign that contains the warranty text ad and keyword blue widget. A campaign is the only parameter that can be common among different sources and mediums. A sale on blue widgets might be promoted in an email, a dedicated pay per click campaign, and by your affiliates. You’d then be able to view the aggregate performance of the campaign under the Google Analytics Traffic sources tab.

While I’ve listed all the campaign variables here as a demonstration, you don’t have to use them all when tagging your links. At a minimum you can use Source and Medium to track your campaigns. To prevent typing errors, and quickly build out tagged links for your campaigns you can make use of Google URL Builder.

Issues With Tracking Parameters

Capitalization

When naming sources and mediums always use the same letter casing. If you tag two newsletters with mediums “email” and “Email” these will show up as two separate mediums in analytics. Choose a letter case and stick with it for sources and mediums.

Length

You probably noticed that adding tracking tags to a URL makes it really long, and ugly to look at. This poses a potential click through problem for plain text emails, or messages on Twitter with the 140 character limit. A way around this is to use one of the many URL shortening services.

Duplicate Content

Google views the original URL, and tagged URL as separate pieces of content. So when you use tracking parameters extensively, and people start linking to both URLS it dilutes the power of your link equity and search engine rankings. To avoid this issue change your query parameter from a question mark (?) to a hash tag (#). However, this will require modifying your Google Analytics tracking tag to pick up the hash tags.

301 Redirects

A 301 redirect of your landing page will strip all your tracking parameters. To prevent this from occurring the URL should point to the final destination page after the redirect. Or the server will have to be modified to pass tracking parameters.

Photo credit The Cosmic Cat

When someone goes through the checkout process on our site the url’s look something like:

1) /cart
2) /session/new?return_to=%2Forders%2Fnew
3) /orders/new
4) /orders/3575/payment
5) /orders/3575/confirmation

Notice the dynamic url’s in numbers 3 and 4? After doing a little research I stumbled upon an informative post by Lunametrics, the comments section especially has a wealth of information about setting up goals with dynamic url’s. However, the examples provided didn’t fit my exact situation so I had write the following regular expressions.

1) ^/cart
2) ^/session/new
3) ^/orders/(?=new)
4) ^/orders/b0*[1-9][0-9]{0,8}b/(?=payment)
5) ^/orders/b0*[1-9][0-9]{0,8}b/(?=confirmation)

This will work for a range of numbers from 1 – 1,000,000,000. When we reach 1 billion orders I plan on putting a big flashing neon colored sign on the website announcing the fact. Just like McDonald’s does on the Golden Arch.

Be sure you’ve set Match Type to Regular Expressions in the goal information settings.

Hopefully this helps anyone who finds themselves in a similar situation.