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Categories: Analytics, SEO
Posted: by Ben Bogard

What is it?

UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) is a redirect link that can tell Google Analytics where traffic from that link is coming from. You have likely used and seen these 100s of time without knowing if you have ever clicked on a link in social media, an email campaign or from an Ad hosted on a site.

When should I use it?

If you want to know:

  • How people get to your survey and from where.
  • What email link someone clicked on to get to a site or survey.
  • What QR code someone used to get to a site or survey.

What difference does it make?

Adding a campaign URL helps us dig further into analytics.

Screenshot of analytics without Campaign URLs showing it is hard to understand what on facebook was clicked as a referral
The same analytics of the same references but with a custom URL showing exactly where the referral came from (Burke Gilman Trail Missing Link Project OOH list)

How does it work?

1. User clicks URL

A button or links from an email, ad, QR code, etc.

2. URL redirects to destination

Link magically changes from the campaign URL to the destination URL.

3. User lands on final destination

Final destination being the end point where the user intended on going.

4. Google delivers the custom URL to Analytics

This will allow an analyst find out how many visitors clicked on what URL and from where.

Why does this matter?

It is important to find out how our campaigns work so we can deliver results to our clients. Additionally, we want to know internally how we can continue to improve engagement as technology continues to evolve. For example, people do not engage with emails as much as they used to, but QR codes continue to appear more and more in our daily lives as people continue getting comfortable accessing them with their smartphones.

When does this need to be set up?

Before your campaign starts. Data cannot be collected after someone interacts with a URL. Yes, we do count visits to our sites but any traffic from an emails or QR codes are not descriptive and are only displayed as ‘Direct’ referrals. Using a campaign code allows us to find the coded URL in Google Analytics outside of a ‘Direct’ referral which must be set up before traffic begins.

How do I do this?

It depends. First, we ask, ‘how do access the data’? For example, we cannot access any data under soundtransit.org as we do not control that domain. If we (or anyone) cannot access the data, then there is no point in this excercise.

If we do control the domain (such as anything with participate.online), then we can access the data because we (EnviroIssues) own the domain and have set up Google Analytics for reporting.

If there is no domain, then we can purchase one or potentially leverage participate.online to create a campaign URL.

The dev team can help with any domain we already own or want to own. We also have Google Analytics automatically set up on all of our web projects. There is more information on those capabilities on a post published by our own in-house analytics expert, Arthur Lee.

Setting up a campaign for a pre-existing URL is pretty easy by filling out this form provided by Google. The dev team can also set this up for you or make sure it is set up correctly. You may need more than one campaign URL set up if you are using more than one source of traffic for example an email link AND a QR code would require two separate campaign URLs.