Custom link tracking / UTM / Campaign tracking

[Charley]

Hey guys,

Does anyone know stuff about using UTM codes to track website traffic?

I'm managing the marketing for an arts-tech startup, and I'm looking to implement it, but the development team are working part-time in San Francisco so I need to be absolutely clear about what I want, it will be difficult to have a conversation with them.

I have a few questions; perhaps it's better if I lay them out in the format of an example.

Let's say I have a site called www.cake.com

I've hooked up Google Analytics to my website, and I've inserted the listening code into the header of every page.

I've decided that I want to run two campaigns from Twitter, one that talks about white cakes directing to the homepage,
and one that talks about brown cakes.

I've generated the following URLs:
www.cake.com?utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=white
www.cake.com?utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=brown

So when I go to my analytics page, I should be able to see which campaign drove more traffic to my website, white or brown.

Here are some questions:

1) Will Google Analytics track any UTM code, or does it need to be told which codes to look for? If it tracks any code, does that mean people could make their own UTM codes, and it would show up in my analytics? Could that be used to spam an analytics page? For example, if someone were to click 100 times on www.cake.com?utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=fuck-you would 'fuck-you' come up 100 times in my analytics?

2) As I've inserted the listening code into the header of every page, will Google Analytics therefore track any new UTM codes I use, on any page? For example if one of my pages is www.cakes.com/yay if I then share the following URL:

www.cake.com/yay?utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=brown

Would these items be tracked automatically? Or does something else need to be done on the back-end.

I guess actually all of these questions can be answered with the same answer. I've had a search around on the internet and I'm 80% sure of the answer, but I wanted to check with someone who knows for sure, and I couldn't be assed to set up a website just to test it.

[Thijn]

1) Yes, but it will only track it once for that specific person. Once you click on the link the cookie has been set, and there will be no new hit send.

Also, when you've been on the website before (and have the google analytics cookie) the new source wont override the old one.
For example, I came to this forum directly. If I then click on a link to this forum with UTM params added to it, it would not count towards that source since I came from somewhere else originally.
2) Yes

This is a screenshot of the analytics of this forum with some funny sources I plonked in the URL.

[Charley]

Thanks Thijn, you're my hero.

So is there a way to track hits from people who are clicking through from Twitter more than once, from different campaigns? Or will they only ever be tracked once, because the cookie is set? If the latter is the case, does this mean it's only possible to track new visitors when monitoring the efficacy of campaigns?

[MaiYan]

Yes you would have different UTM campaigns if you wanted to test how each individual tweet was doing. When tracking returning visits it would be whatever cookie they hit last

[Charley]

Ah right, cool, thanks.