The Content Marketer’s Guide to UTM Parameters for Tracking Referrals

The Content Marketer’s Guide to UTM Parameters for Tracking Referrals

Reader Comments (8)

  1. Great post and primer. Two additional points that are important.

    While you need not use all five, you must use: utm_medium, utm_source, and utm_campaign. Without those three, Google analytics will not track it at all.

    And there is another reason to not use UTM parameters internally. They start a new session. Which will inflate your bounce rate and skew your landing and exit pages.

    • Hey Jacob! Thanks for reading 🙂

      You’re right that changing campaign (or source or medium) starts a new session and can royally screw up your data. Thanks for bringing that up! However, though the Google documentation indeed says you need to use all three, I’ve found that either source or medium will be tracked if available.

  2. Hey Loryn,

    Tracking referrals are really important to get better sales in future. I too use UTM parameters to track referrals, and I must say they are really helpful. But the key is not to overuse it and do the things which are necessary.

    Thanks for sharing this article. It contains a lot of details and information about UTM parameter. I really enjoyed reading this.

    • Thanks, Jitendra! You’re right, it’s important not to get overwhelmed with tracking. I can’t tell you how many events that I set up and never looked at again!

      I’m so glad you enjoyed the article — it’s not often people say that about data stuff 😉 Have a great one!

  3. Hi Loryn,

    Thanks for sharing this post. Although this is all pretty new to me, I learned some things from reading it! As I begin to develop my products for sale, this is looming up in the near future on my learning curve!

    • Jane —

      Glad you liked the post, and that you learned something! 🙂 Now that you know that the problem exists and how to solve it, as long as you keep things simple I’m sure you’ll do great.

  4. Thanks a lot for this article! It really simplifies the UTM parameters. Now I understand why we use them and how to implement them.

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