Written by Mazdak Safaei, Head of Ad Operations at Glacier Media
Starting July 2017, Glacier Media made it mandatory to use UTM tagging for all the Community and Programmatic Display campaigns. If clients or sales reps are not providing UTM instructions, Glacier Media Ad Operations are using the following format by default:
For Programmatic Display:
http://www.example.com/?utm_source=glaciermedia&utm_medium=programmatic
Or
For Community Display:
http://www.example.com/?utm_source=glaciermedia&utm_medium=community
UTM tagging allows you to add some trackable extensions to your URL to categorize and monitor the different traffic sources coming to your landing pages and identify their origins.
Tagging is a useful tactic since sometimes the referral traffic source information is not collected correctly in Google Analytics, for lots of different reasons including as a secured sites/HTTPS will not pass referrer information to an unsecured sites/HTTP. If referrer information isn’t accessible, Google Analytics either routes the incomplete data into ‘Direct Traffic’ or ‘Other’, even though it was 100% ‘Referrer Traffic’ from their display campaign.
Q: How should you tackle this issue?
A: Use UTM tagging in your click-through URL and track different referral information in the client’s Google Analytics account.
The UTM extensions to use are:
Campaign Source (mandatory): the source or website the link is coming from (e.g. vancourier).
Campaign Medium: the medium for the creative (e.g. programmatic).
Campaign Name: to identify the links with the same source and medium (e.g. september_campaign).
Campaign Term: if you are using referrals or paid search, add terms with relevant keywords for your link to be better identified.
Campaign Content: this is useful if you are A/B testing your links to be able to distinguish between A & B.
PRO-TIP: Use this free UTM builder tool for your next display campaign https://goo.gl/j3GeZR
Let’s say you are running a Programmatic Display campaign for your client. The click-through URL should be something like:
http://www.example.com/?utm_source=nsnews&utm_medium=programmatic&utm_campaign=summer_sale
How to track campaigns in Google Analytics?
You can track your campaign’s analytics under “ACQUISITION” → “All Traffic” → “Source/Medium”.
