2.09 - UTM & URL tracking

1 - Findings & Impacts

UTM is the acronym for Urchin Tracking Module. It is a URL tracking system used in digital marketing campaigns that can identify and track traffic from digital campaigns in the Google Analytics interface (Urchin is the name of the company bought by Google and used as the basis for the development of Google Analytics).

They generally 3 main parameters (utm source / media / campaign) to specify the media and campaign used.

Example: https://www.mysite.com/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=spring_sale

Unfortunately, each URL with these UTM parameters will duplicate the content of the page that does not have the UTM parameters. All these useless pages will be crawled by Googlebot at the expense of strategic pages.

2 - Recommendations

Use "#" rather than "?"

The hash key is used to anchor a link in a page, and is therefore outside of the search engines' crawling scope. This is today the most effective way to prevent Googlebot from following UTM URLs.

The problem is that Google Analytics is not configured by default to follow this type of URL. It will therefore be necessary to modify the tracking code used.

By default, the asynchronous GATC is as follows:

If you use the hash key in your tagged URLs, then you will need to add the "_setAllowAnchor" function, which will instruct Google Analytics to check for the presence of the settings after the hash key. With the asynchronous code you will need to add the following line:

Note: If you use Universal Analytics this feature is native. Do a test to make sure the data is coming back correctly

Which will give:

Adding this feature will allow UTM information to appear in the Google Analytics console.

Then you will only need to add the line:

to find out if your web pages show up quickly to your visitors, which gives the code below: