from Hacker News

How to use UTM parameters to grow your audience

by yakshaving on 5/20/20, 10:18 PM with 54 comments

• by gk1 on 5/20/20, 11:02 PM

  “Grow your audience” is a stretch here. Better to say “...to see where traffic comes from.”

  If you want to go a step further and see which traffic sources lead to form completions (like newsletter or app signups), I made a utility that captures UTM parameters and then inserts them into any form submitted during that session: https://github.com/gkogan/sup-save-url-parameters

• by _jal on 5/21/20, 1:04 AM

  I occasionally change them to something random, like "potato_world_weekly_back_cover". Figure it might provide a little entertainment to bored marketeers.

• by petercooper on 5/20/20, 10:50 PM

  I run a newsletter company with almost 500k subscribers. When I started out 10 years ago, I was a fan of Google Analytics so added these parameters to all links in my newsletters. This was uncommon at the time and it turned out to have a huge impact on our growth as lots of webmasters were glued to their analytics at the time, wondered who we were, and Googled the name of our newsletters! I got emails or tweets every week saying as much and thanking us for linking to them, etc.

  In the last five years it hasn't come up at all as everyone is doing it and people seem to dig through their analytics less than ever before, but if it helps you track links to your own content, as being shown in the article, it's certainly worth a go.

  Another amusing point is that HN didn't used to strip these parameters, so sometimes I could see when people had reposted things from our newsletters on to HN (and kept the utm params in) which was always a buzz :-)

• by monadic2 on 5/20/20, 11:42 PM

  https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/utm-tracking-...

  I have never observed a “utm” query param actually improve the quality of the response.

  We all know why this obviously positive functionality isn’t built into the browser: because browser vendors rely on hostile business practices to survive. Still no technology to transact with the site you’re visiting for their content....

• by hbcondo714 on 5/21/20, 4:02 AM

  I came across another article[1] on this and they state to "Never use UTM parameters on internal links (e.g., homepage sliders, internal banners, or internal links on blog posts). Clicking on those internal links will cause the current session to end and a new session to start—attributing the new session to the source/medium used on the internal link."

  [1] https://cxl.com/blog/utm-parameters/

• by anigbrowl on 5/21/20, 2:10 AM

  Neat URL is a Chrome extension that automatically removes all that cruft from URLs. Not affiliated with the author, just sick of people like this author littering in my address bar.

  https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/neat-url/jchobbjgi...

• by zamalek on 5/21/20, 4:14 AM

  I don't understand why we have to store the entire dataset in the URL, when something like ?utm_id=1 (mapped to the others in some database) would do. It's stuff like this that prevents average users from "getting" URLs; they don't know what UTM is and assume it is important to get to the information.

  This garbage breaks the UX of the internet.