UTM Campaign Tracking Lab

STAGE 1 — ANATOMY OF A TAGGED LINK

The brief

Lumen & Co. is a direct-to-consumer skincare brand. On Monday they launch Summer Glow, a 30-day push across paid search, paid social, email, two influencers and retargeting display. Total media budget: $61,500.

You are the analyst. Nobody will ask you about tracking for the next 30 days. Then everybody will ask you about it at once.

Start with the problem

Below is an ordinary campaign link, exactly as most people would paste it into an ad. Watch what the analytics platform is able to record about anyone who clicks it.

Campaign URL

You can edit this URL directly, or load one of the examples below.

What the analytics platform records

What do these words mean?

Session source: Where the visit came from, as the platform recorded it. Taken from utm_source if the link was tagged, and guessed from the referring website if it was not.
Session medium: The kind of traffic: a paid click, an email, a partner link. This is the field that decides the channel group.
Referrer: The website the browser says it came from. Email apps and messaging apps send no referrer at all, which is why untagged email has nothing to fall back on.
Default channel group: The bucket the platform files the visit into (Paid Search, Email, Display and so on). It is calculated from source and medium together, not chosen by you.
Direct: The bucket for visits with no tags and no referrer. It reads as "someone typed our address in", but in practice it is where untraceable traffic accumulates.
Unassigned: The bucket for visits the platform could not fit into any channel, usually because the medium was a word it does not recognize.

STAGE 2 — YOUR TAGGING PLAN

Naming conventions

These apply to every tag you write below. Conventions are the whole game once more than one person touches the account.

Force everything to lowercase Word separator Also tag links between pages on our own site

Lumen & Co. runs five paid traffic sources. You will work through them one at a time, easiest first. The first one is already filled in as a worked example.

Plan review

You can deploy with warnings outstanding. Most teams do.

STAGE 3 — CAMPAIGN RUNNING

Day 0 of 30

Launching…

STAGE 4 — THE DEBRIEF

Your analytics dashboard

This is everything you can see. It is also everything the CMO can see.

These four buttons are separate reports over the same 30 days. Click between them: each one can answer a different kind of question, and one of them may not be able to answer anything at all.

The CMO wants answers

Answer from the dashboard above. Do not guess what is really happening — answer the way you would in the meeting, using only what you can see.

Now split next month's budget

You have $60,000. Put it where your dashboard says it will work hardest.

Allocated: $0 of $60,000 Allocate the full budget to continue.