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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Why set up campaign parameters?
- To find out how much traffic your online publications send to your site
- To attribute revenue to this traffic
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 campaign 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:
Campaign URL 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.
How to choose between Pass URL Parameters and Campaign URL Parameters functionality?
In the Advanced settings tab of the Publication Reader menu a similar feature is found, 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:
- 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
We recommend using the Campaign URL Parameters because it fully automates the process for you where the Pass URL Parameters relies on manual input and the consistency of this manual process.
For example, for every publication shared, the parameters will have to be appended. Publications are usually via multiple channels which makes it difficult to manage the consistency of all tags (e.g. utm_source=Publitas and utm_source=publitas become two different line items in the reports).
There is one advantage of the Pass URL parameters feature, which is that allows you to append a different source identifier for every channel you share the publication on. This does come with the sidenote that you won't be able to do so on channels you don't own or manage yourself.
Here's a simple overview of the differences between adding the UTM yourself or using either of the two features:
