You decide to tag all your URLs with UTM parameters. Great!
You also defined your UTM naming conventions. Awesome!
But you realize there are still a few problems:
- You don’t always follow your own conventions
- Your team doesn’t follow them consistently
- You forget your conventions. They are in some document, but you are too lazy to open it every time you need to build a URL.
Let’s say, for email newsletters, you use a convention which is something like this,
utm_campaign=weekly-2017_06_18
All the UTM builders out there, including spreadsheets, will make you type the whole thing.
This is how it looks like in Google URL Builder.
So many ways to make mistakes here:
- Is it weekly or wkly?
- Is the date format correct? Does the year come before or after?
- Is there a dash (-) or underscore (_) between weekly and date?
- Can I use monthly?
- I hope I didn’t make any typing mistakes.
- Did I use the correct utm_medium and utm_source?
And this is a simple case.
Introducing Conventions
What if your URL builder looked something like this?
All you do is
- Select weekly/monthly for Interval and select a Date (for utm_campaign)
- Select newsletter1 (for utm_source)
That’s it.
Your utm_medium value is already set to email and cannot be changed.
Won’t that make your life so much easier?
You can do this with Terminus.
Define UTM Conventions for any scenario:
What if you could define UTM conventions for different product lines, channels, languages, etc.?
You could have a convention for Social, or even just for Facebook.
For example, you could define a Facebook Naming Convention as
Do you see how easy it becomes to follow your UTM conventions now? We used Facebook as an example because UTM parameters are actually very effective in helping you track any Facebook ADs that you published.
Just select the values or type in free-text. The URL builder will create the correct UTM values for you.
Switch UTM Conventions on the fly:
You don’t have one convention. You have several based on various factors, including channels, products, etc.
But switching between them should be easy.
Awesome, right? Try Terminus free for 21 days and define your own UTM conventions.
Managing UTM conventions becomes so easy:
- No need to maintain any documents for your UTM conventions
- No complicated spreadsheets
- No mistakes in using your UTM conventions
- No need to remember any conventions
- Quickly get new team members up to speed
To make your life even easier, we’ve created a beneficial guide for UTM codes which you can refer to when confused!
Now you and your entire team can build UTM URLs with confidence and move on to the next steps of tracking your marketing efforts with UTMs through Google Analytics.
One Major Beneficial Side Effect:
Some Terminus customers have mentioned that this feature has forced them to think through their UTM tagging strategy carefully. Since these conventions are built into the URL builder, it helped them be very specific about which values are acceptable and which are not.
No more wishy-washy conventions that can be broken anytime by anyone.
It has helped them add an extra layer of discipline.
And with this discipline, your analytics reports will be squeaky clean.
Seriously, if you haven’t already, try Terminus for free. There’s zero risk. Cancel anytime.