Custom Traffic Attributions via UTM Tags

As an audience manager, you want to understand the sources of your site’s traffic and how your marketing campaigns are driving visitors to your site. One way to do this is by using UTM parameters in your URLs.

When specified, UTM parameters take precedence to Marfeel traffic attributions.

What are UTM parameters?

UTM parameters are custom tags that you can add to the end of a URL. They allow you to track the source, medium, and campaign of a visitor’s journey to your website. When a visitor clicks on a UTM-tagged link, the information is passed to the Marfeel platform, giving you a more detailed picture of where your visitors are coming from and how they arrived at your site.

UTM parameters explained

There are 5 UTM parameters that you can use:

  1. utm_source: This parameter is used to identify the source of the traffic, such as “google” or “facebook”.
  2. utm_medium: identifies the medium of the traffic, such as “cpc” for cost-per-click advertising or “social” for social media traffic.
  3. utm_campaign: identifies a specific marketing campaign, such as “spring_sale” or “morning_newsletter”.
  4. utm_term: identifies the keywords used in paid search campaigns.
  5. utm_content: differentiates between versions of the same ad or message, such as “banner_1” and “banner_2”.

Marfeel reports utm_source as Traffic Source, utm_medium as Traffic Medium, utm_campaign as Traffic Campaign, and makes these dimensions available throughout the data warehouse and different reports.

On Explore:

TIP:

utm_source, utm_medium, and utm_campaign are available on the Marfeel UI. utm_term and utm_content are available at the raw data level.

Marfeel supports a sixth type of UTM utm_cmp_rs to tag internal recirculation.

Practical use cases for UTM parameters

Here are some practical use cases for using UTM parameters in your daily work as an editor:

  • Tracking the effectiveness of social media campaigns: You can add UTM parameters to the links in your social media posts to see which platforms are driving the most traffic to your site.
  • Measuring the impact of newsletters and email campaigns: You can add UTM parameters to the links in your newsletters and email campaigns to track which emails are most effective in driving traffic and conversions.
  • Understanding the impact of paid acquisition: You can add UTM parameters to your paid search and display advertising campaigns to see which keywords and ads are performing the best.
  • Analyzing the effectiveness of specific content and internal recirculation modules: You can add UTM parameters to the links in your articles and blog posts to see which content is driving the most traffic and engagement.

Creating UTM-tagged URLs

To create a UTM-tagged URL, you simply add the parameters and their values to the end of the URL. For example:

https://www.example.com/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=spring_sale
WARNING:

UTM medium is always normalized to lowercase.

  • i.e: social, Social, and sociaL would become the same medium.

UTM source is normalized if it’s a known source.

  • facebook, Facebook, and FaceBook will become Facebook, as it’s a known source.
  • AnExample, Anexample, and anexample would be 3 different sources.

Push notifications

Push notifications are an effective way to engage with your audience and drive traffic to your website. However, without proper tracking and attribution, it can be difficult to understand the impact of your push notifications on your website traffic.

Push notification traffic is often attributed as direct traffic. Direct traffic means that a user arrived at your website by typing the URL directly into their browser or through a bookmark.

In Marfeel, unless properly tagged, Push notifications traffic is attributed as Dark Social.

To properly attribute Push Notification traffic, we recommend you to use a utm_medium=Push Notifications which will appear under “Other”. You can also use utm_source for finer-grained resolution:

utm_medium=Push Notifications
utm_source=type of push

Social scheduling

When using social platforms like Echobox to automate and schedule your social feeds, we recommend you use the following combination of UTM parameters:

utm_medium=social
utm_campaign=echobox

This will bundle all social traffic under the Social traffic medium and the corresponding social network (Facebook, Twitter, etc), and you will still be able to analyze Echobox’s value by checking Traffic Campaigns.

Paid campaigns

When running paid acquisition campaigns, for example from Facebook, add: utm_medium=paid&utm_source=Facebook (note paid in lowercase and Facebook with a capital letter).