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.comI'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=brownWould 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.