FAQs on Campaign URL Tagging

Here are some of the most commonly asked questions related to Campaign URL tagging, UTM parameters, and marketing taxonomy

What is Campaign URL tagging?

Campaign URL tagging involves adding few key parameters to the campaign landing page URL to capture more information about your website visitors.

www.camptag.ai?utm_source=googleads

In this URL, the part after the ‘question mark’ is a tag that helps you understand where the traffic came from.

What does UTM stand for?

UTM stands for Urchin Tracking Module, Urchin being a product that Google acquired in 2005.

UTM tags or UTM parameters are used to tag landing page URLs in Google Ads or any other paid campaigns. UTM tags are displayed in Google Analytics under Acquisition -> Campaigns.

How do I add a tracking tag to a URL?

Tracking tags are added to URLs in a specific format. They start with a question mark that separates the URL from the parameters.

Each parameter is a key value pair that defines what is being tracked and a specific value for it.

Here is a tagged URL with 3 key value pairs for utm_source, utm_medium and utm_campaign.

http://www.camptag.ai?utm_source=googleads&utm_medium=paid&utm_campaign=branding

What are the 5 common UTM parameters?

The 5 most common UTM parameters

• utm_source - This parameter denotes where the traffic comes from. Examples are Google Ads, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Mailchimp, Sendinblue
• utm_medium - Denotes the channel used to bring in the campaign traffic. Examples are PPC, Social, Email, Affiliates, Article Submissions
• utm_campaign - Denotes the campaign name, or the type of campaign used. Examples are Lead Generation, Branding, Christmas sale, Product launch
• utm_content - Denotes the type of link or ad. Examples are Text Ads, Banner Ads, Logo, Footer links, Video, Carousels
• utm_term - Specifies the keyword used by the visitor to arrive at your website. You can either specify the keyword for each URL, or your ad platform can auto-populate this field.

How many UTM parameters can be added to a campaign URL?

In addition to 5 standard parameters, you can add multiple custom dimensions to gather more information about your campaign performance.

utm_id in Google Analytics and cid in Adobe Analytics can be used to concatenate a large number of parameters into a single ID.

What is gclid in Google Ads?

If you enable auto-tagging in Google Ads, gclid gets added automatically to your landing page URLs, to track specific campaign information.

gclid values are not automatically displayed in Google Analytics. You have to add gclid as a Custom Dimension under Settings -> Custom Definitions -> Custom Dimensions to enable viewing that information in GA.

What is utm_id?

utm_id is a string of numbers that are used instead of elaborate UTM parameters to:

• Shorten campaign URLs
• Add more custom dimensions to the URLs
• Hide your campaign parameters from competitors

This is a very efficient method wherein a single value captures all the UTM parameters like utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign, and more. A typical URL looks like this.

www.camptag.ai?utm_id=6678945

You need to import a spreadsheet with these unique IDs and the parameters mapped to it, for Google Ads and Analytics to show you accurate information.

What is cid in Adobe Analytics?

cid stands for Campaign ID. Adobe analytics uses S.campaign variable to summarize the meta-data from your campaigns into a single value. S.campaign variable stands for SAINT or SiteCatalyst Attribute Importing and Naming Tool.

URLs are shortened into:

www.camptag.ai?cid=3435337

Where cid is a unique identifier that summaries all the campaign information. Here too, you need to upload a spreadsheet which maps the cid to various campaign parameters.

What is Marketing Taxonomy?

Marketing Taxonomy is the science of using standard naming conventions to map your customer’s journey across the web. Standard naming conventions followed across various marketing initiatives will help you understand the performance of the different channels.

Most enterprises are now realizing the need to maintain standard marketing taxonomies to:

• Reduce inconsistencies in data
• Reduce reporting errors
• Generate better analytics reports
• Enable seamless collaboration between different teams
• Enable cross-channel marketing
• Help better attribution and decision-making

What is Campaign Taxonomy?

Campaign taxonomy is the practice of naming all your marketing campaigns using standard name formats, so that you can capture all relevant dimensions about your paid campaigns.

This could be across advertising platforms, media purchases, affiliate networks, email campaigns etc. so that the data captured is comprehensive and error-free.

Most marketers only look at campaign tagging, which involves adding parameters to your landing page URLs. These same dimensions values can be concatenated into your marketing taxonomy, so that the name itself reveals a great deal of information about campaign performance.

This is especially important when you are running hundreds and thousands of paid campaigns across various platforms, resulting in millions of data points flowing in every day.

Standardized naming conventions help you read and interpret the data, to enable better Returns on Ad Spend or ROAS.

What is Marketing Data Governance?

ata Governance involves standardized practices in collecting, handling, storing, maintaining, transferring, disseminating and using data, that is generated by an organization through customers, vendors, shareholders, employees etc.

Marketing Data Governance pertains specifically to data related to customers, marketing departments, campaign spend, and sales. With data flowing into an organization through various channels, there must be standardized, quality-checked, tested and refined processes in place to handle this data efficiently.

Most data related to customers have to handled with utmost security, which is of late, running into serious controversies. Marketing data governance ensures that all data is handled with care, and available to the right people at the right time.

If you need help with following standard campaign taxonomy and URL tagging for your organization, reach out to CampTag today. Our cutting-edge campaign tagging tool can help you add hundreds of custom dimensions to your campaign to enable better analytics.