BETA NOTICE: If you're interested in using this beta feature and you're on the Enterprise plan, feel free to reach out to your success manager who will activate this for you.
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If you're looking at the referral reports in your website's Google Analytics property to find out how much traffic is coming from the online publications and how many transactions this yielded, UTM parameters can help gain even deeper insights.
In this article:
- Why set up UTM parameters?
- What are UTM parameters?
- How to add UTM parameters?
- UTM parameters explained
- Configuring UTM parameters in Publitas versus passing URL parameters
Why set up UTM parameters?
By default, referral traffic only gives you the domain name traffic came from (e.g. view.publitas.com). Using UTM parameters you can name the source yourself (e.g. Publitas). You can also add additional details like the medium used (e.g. catalog), the corresponding campaign name (e.g. blackfriday2021) and the specific product clicked (e.g. layle-tee-xs-blue).
What are UTM parameters?
UTM parameters are tags, supported by Google Analytics, which you can add to the end of the URLs of your marketing campaigns which generate traffic to your site. In case of online publications these can be appended to the hotspot URLs. Then, when your tagged URL is visited, it allows analytics software to track information, such as how visitors are coming to your site and if they're interacting with any content associated with a campaign. By adding campaign parameters to the URLs, used in your hotspots, you can understand the impact your online publications have on your online marketing and specific campaigns.
For example:
https://www.example.com?utm_source=publitas&utm_medium=catalog&utm_campaign=christmas-2020&utm_content=nativity-garland
Click here to learn more about UTM parameters.
How to add UTM parameters?
At Publication Reader > URLs you can configure the UTM parameters that will be appended to all outgoing links in your online publications, including the Link hotspots, Product hotspots and the Home button in the menu.
Configuring UTM parameters:
UTM parameters explained
- utm_source - When adding campaign parameters the source is the only one required. Submit the source name which will be applied to all links in all publications of the selected group.
- utm_medium - Submit medium name which will be applied to all links in all publications of the selected group.
- utm_campaign - For this parameter the system will use the publication name, found in the URL of the publication, as the parameter value. Updating the publication name in the URL.
- utm_content - For this parameter the system will use the product title, found in the title field of the Product hotspot. If a Link hotspot or the Home button in the menu is clicked the content parameter is not appended.
NOTE: To avoid duplicated parameters activating the Campaign URL parameters feature will disable the Pass URL parameters feature as well as overwrite any UTM parameters found in the hotspots themselves.
Configuring UTM parameters in Publitas versus passing URL parameters
In the Advanced settings tab of the Publication Reader menu you can also find the option to Pass URL parameters. This feature allows you to append a full set of URL parameters to the publication URL and have those added to all outgoing links in the publication automatically.
How it works:
- Select the checkbox
- Copy the share link of the publication
- Paste it in your newsletter, website or other channel you'd like to share it via
- Manually append the set of tracking parameters that apply to the selected use case (in case of a newsletter, most email clients do this for you)
Feature: Pass URL parameters
Note that when passing URL parameters you only leverage the UTM parameters for channels that have these parameters appended to the publication URL. Using the Campaign URL Parameters feature all links will be decorated with UTM parameters regardless of the channel that sent traffic to the publication.
The advantage of the Pass URL parameters feature is that it allows you to append a different source identifier for every channel you share the publication on. This does come with the side note that you won't be able to do so on channels you don't own or manage yourself.
Below is an overview of the differences between adding the UTM to the links manually (Manuel parameters), configuring the UTM parameters (Campaign URL parameters) or passing the UTM parameters (Pass URL parameters).
