Touchpoints will be automatically appended to a contact if the contact visits a tracked url that contains one of the five common UTM parameters.
You do not need to do anything to set up traffic sources, except to make sure the Site Tracking snippet is installed on every page you want to track.
What is ActiveCampaign Site Tracking?
Attribution relies on ActiveCampaign Site Tracking to function properly. Site tracking tracks every visit contacts make to your website and associates it with their contact record. This allows you to segment your contacts if they have or have not visited a web page, and to trigger automations when a key web page is visited.
Attribution enhances these capabilities by automatically parsing the 5 common UTM parameters when a contact visits a URL that contains these parameters and calls these special site visits a touchpoint.
What are UTM tracking parameters?
UTM parameters are special parameters that were originally used by Google Analytics (historically “urchin traffic monitor”). They were originally used to measure which advertising channels, campaigns, keywords, and ad content a user interacted with.
Since they are just a string of query parameters appended to the end of a URL, many other marketing platforms have adopted them in a similar way, to track and measure the effectiveness of a marketer's advertising and marketing campaigns.
The five UTM parameters are
- utm_medium (ex: “CPC” for cost per click)
- utm_source (ex: facebook.com)
- utm_campaign (ex: “US Newsfeed”)
- utm_term (ex: “Buy more stuff”
- utm_content (ex: “Red Banner”)
Many services provide UTM builders that are free for you to use.
How to set up UTM parameters for emails
ActiveCampaign makes it easy to automatically append UTM tracking parameters for all of the links in your emails. This is the same as configuring each email to work with Google Analytics.
All you need to do is make sure Google Analytics setting is enabled on the Campaign Summary page for each campaign.
From there, you'll be presented with a modal window asking you to specify the Google Analytics campaign name. Type the Google Analytics campaign name into the field provided and click "Done." This will match the utm_campaign parameter.