Set Up Campaign Tracking (UTM)
Last updated: 11th July, 2024
GoSquared campaign tracking allows you to easily monitor the performance of your ad campaigns in real-time. If the goal of your campaign is to drive traffic to a page on your site, the link you put in your advert should include UTM parameters.
UTM parameters are the industry standard way of doing campaign tracking and attribution. GoSquared automatically tracks the UTM information – therefore telling you how well each campaign performed.
💡 In This Article
Video Guide to building UTM links
What are UTM links?
How to make UTM links
Dashboard Campaigns
Campaigns in ‘Contacts’
Video Guide to building your first UTM links
What are UTM links?
UTM links behave just like regular links but they have some extra information added to the end to describe the campaign:
Campaign Name (
utm_campaign) – this is the name of the campaign you are running. For example 'Black Friday deal' or 'Christmas offer'. This is what GoSquared groups your campaigns by in the Now and Trends dashboards.Campaign Source (
utm_source) – this is the platform that the campaign is running on. For example, Facebook, Google, email.Campaign Medium (
utm_medium) – this is the type of ad that you are running. For example the ad could be a Facebook 'newsfeed' ad or placed in an email 'newsletter'.
Example UTM link
If you're running a campaign for a special Black Friday offer on Facebook, you would want the campaign to link to your Black Friday deals page. The UTM link in your ad campaign would look something like this:
https://yoursite.com/black-friday-deals?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=newsfeed&utm_campaign=black-friday
The extra information after the ? tells GoSquared that the user came from a Facebook ad placed in the Newsfeed about Black Friday. You would then use this link in your ad campaign.
As soon as somebody visits your site after clicking that ad, GoSquared will see the utm_campaign parameter and count it as a visit for the black-friday campaign.
How to make UTM links
You can use our simple Campaign URL Builder that will help you add UTM parameters to your inbound links.
Make sure you fill in the Campaign Name and Campaign Source fields for GoSquared tracking to work properly.
Dashboard Campaigns
Now Dashboard
The Now dashboard shows you information about visitors that are on your site right now. The Campaign widget shows you the number of visitors (currently online) that came from each campaign.
They are grouped by the Campaign Name (utm_campaign).
If you can't see the Campaigns widget edit your dashboard layout by pressing the 'e' key on your keyboard.
Trends Dashboard
The Campaigns widget in Trends behaves similarly to the Now dashboard, but it shows you historical data for the time period that you have selected. The information is grouped by the total number of visits that came from each Campaign Name.
You can click through on each campaign name to view the breakdown of visits by campaign source, medium, term, and content too.
Campaign tracking was added as a new feature to the Trends dashboard on 28th July 2017. Therefore you won't be able to view campaign information in Trends before this date.
If you can't see the Campaigns widget edit your dashboard layout by pressing the 'e' key on your keyboard.
GoSquared Contacts
The Contacts centre tracks your user's activity on an individual level. When you 'identify' a user or start a Live Chat conversation with them, GoSquared creates a profile for them in Contacts. We will backfill their profile with all of their anonymous session activity from before they registered/signed up for your site.
The means that you can see the original referrer from this user's first ever visit – we call this the Original Source URL.
The page that the user is referred to (i.e the page on your site that your campaign is driving traffic to), is called the Landing page. GoSquared's UTM tracking works by looking for any UTM parameters in the URL of the Landing page.
Viewing Campaign data in Contacts
If the landing page contains UTM campaign parameters, you can filter/search your users based on these properties:
Original Campaign Name
This is the utm_campaign that the user clicked on when they viewed your site for the very first time.
Original Campaign Source
This is the utm_source that the user clicked on when they viewed your site for the very first time.
Original Campaign Medium
This is the utm_medium that the user clicked on when they viewed your site for the very first time.
Landing Page
This is the first ever page that a visitor viewed on your site – the page they landed on. It's tracked as two properties, the Page Title and the the Page Path (the URL path, e.g /black-friday-deal).
Original Source URL
The referring website/page that the visitor clicked through to your site from.
We will also try to automatically classify the Source Type as either 'Site', 'Social' or 'Organic'.
Bonus 🎉
Want to know how to use UTM parameters to supercharge your Marketing campaigns? Check out Russell’s guide here!
🗣️ If you have any questions about setting up UTMs, just get in touch!