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“Grow your audience” is a stretch here. Better to say “...to see where traffic comes from.” If you want to go a step further and see which traffic sources lead

by gk1 6y ago

“Grow your audience” is a stretch here. Better to say “...to see where traffic comes from.” If you want to go a step further and see which traffic sources lead to form completions (like newsletter or app signups), I made a utility that captures UTM parameters and then inserts them into any form submitted during that session: https://github.com/gkogan/sup-save-url-parameters https://github.com/gkogan/sup-save-url-parameters

kirillzubovsky 6y ago
That's really useful! It's actually surprising that something like this doesn't come as a default with Mailchimp forms. Just forked it and will give it a try. Thank you!
- gk1 6y ago
  I’ve used multiple marketing platforms, some costing $xx,000/year, and still haven’t seen this feature.
  - redis_mlc 6y ago
    Well, those parameters are intended for GA to parse, so there's several reasons for analytics competitors to not add those: 1) they make it easier for the marketer to setup campaigns with a paid competitor, and then drop the subscription for that software and monitor them with GA only 2) they make GA top-of-mind for marketers every time they look at a link with UTM in it, even in somebody else's marketing dashboard (free advertising for GA) 3) GA gets to collect campaign data, freeriding on the analytics competitor
- medius 6y ago
  You can also check out https://github.com/medius/utm_form https://github.com/medius/utm_form which can handle a lot of use cases. (Disclosure: I created this to help my customers at https://www.terminusapp.com https://www.terminusapp.com)
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - gk1 6y ago
    Nice product. I came across it recently when researching other accessible methods for capturing UTM parameters. Yours was the only other one I found.
- hnick 6y ago
  I'm pretty sure I saw this somewhere in one of the other marketing automation tools but yes it's definitely not common. Kind of related, I saw a webinar by Ontraport recently and they were going a step further by saving google analytics IDs against contacts for deep funnel conversion tracking. The idea is they don't really care about who signs up for a free trial, they want to know who upgrades to paid within the trial period and usually the attribution is all messed up by then or they don't know who is who. So saving details and manually calling google will help to track this. It seems there are still a lot of little tricks out there that aren't standard practice.
  - cosmie 6y ago
    Yea, that combined with the User Activity API is incredibly handy. Especially useful to pull out when some anomaly occurs, and stakeholders suddenly want a particular conversion under the microscope (an unexpected enterprise user, unusually large order value, an unexpectedly frequent recurring customer, etc). That said, all of the browsers are becoming so aggressive about cookie management that relying on the Google-set clientID is asking for pain at this point, unless you've implemented something like this[1] cookie setting service/proxy/relay. Creating your own first-party identifier (even if it's just randomly generated the same as the GA clientID) and leveraging the user-id field is far more stable. > It seems there are still a lot of little tricks out there that aren't standard practice. Simo Ahava's blog (linked to in [1]) is a wealth of nifty web analytics tricks (primarily focused around Google Tag Manager, Google Analytics, and a sprinkling of Snowplow[2] for the self-hosted crowd). The blog is geared at a less technical audience, but the vast majority of content is around technical nuances of analytics implementations and fairly minor coding adjustments that can be made to significantly enhance a standard implementation. [1] https://www.simoahava.com/google-cloud/create-cookie-rewrite-web-service-google-cloud/ https://www.simoahava.com/google-cloud/create-cookie-rewrite... [2] https://snowplowanalytics.com/ https://snowplowanalytics.com/
    - hnick 6y ago
      In the near future tracking won't be as easy as throwing a script from Facebook into a blog header. I wonder where it's leading. One guess I had is people will be plugging in web service calls to get the info behind the scenes and generate a first party cookie. Not sure if that capability exists yet but it does sound like your first link so I'll have a read, thanks. Edit: I had a look through that first link, nice hack, but definitely out of reach of most small businesses. That's kind of how these things go, big players have the resources to jump a hurdle without slowing down, everyone else is left behind.
dmkii 6y ago
Nice work! Have you considered using localStorage instead of sessionStorage so it works across browser tabs as well?
- nitrogen 6y ago
  Does thay difference have implications under GDPR or California's new law?
  - dmkii 6y ago
    No, it’s stored on the user’s own computer only. You could put an expiry date in there as well so you don’t accidentally use it after, say, 90 days.
- gk1 6y ago
  I did consider it recently, but decided against it as it would mix last-touch with last-tagged-touch attribution. If you fail to tag a campaign link it would be good for the conversion to not have data, so you recognize the error and tag the link. If I were to do localStorage I would only do it if the first touch and last touch tags (even if empty) were saved as separate values. That just means slightly more coding which I haven’t gotten around to. Pull requests welcome :)
mrgreenfur 6y ago
I made a startup to try and answer one question further: connect incoming traffic to conversion events and assign credit. This is where you'll get a real bottoms-up view of your marketing effectivness.

by gk1 6y ago

kirillzubovsky 6y ago

That's really useful! It's actually surprising that something like this doesn't come as a default with Mailchimp forms. Just forked it and will give it a try. Thank you!

gk1 6y ago
I’ve used multiple marketing platforms, some costing $xx,000/year, and still haven’t seen this feature.
- redis_mlc 6y ago
  Well, those parameters are intended for GA to parse, so there's several reasons for analytics competitors to not add those: 1) they make it easier for the marketer to setup campaigns with a paid competitor, and then drop the subscription for that software and monitor them with GA only 2) they make GA top-of-mind for marketers every time they look at a link with UTM in it, even in somebody else's marketing dashboard (free advertising for GA) 3) GA gets to collect campaign data, freeriding on the analytics competitor
medius 6y ago
You can also check out https://github.com/medius/utm_form https://github.com/medius/utm_form which can handle a lot of use cases. (Disclosure: I created this to help my customers at https://www.terminusapp.com https://www.terminusapp.com)
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- gk1 6y ago
  Nice product. I came across it recently when researching other accessible methods for capturing UTM parameters. Yours was the only other one I found.
hnick 6y ago
I'm pretty sure I saw this somewhere in one of the other marketing automation tools but yes it's definitely not common. Kind of related, I saw a webinar by Ontraport recently and they were going a step further by saving google analytics IDs against contacts for deep funnel conversion tracking. The idea is they don't really care about who signs up for a free trial, they want to know who upgrades to paid within the trial period and usually the attribution is all messed up by then or they don't know who is who. So saving details and manually calling google will help to track this. It seems there are still a lot of little tricks out there that aren't standard practice.
- cosmie 6y ago
  Yea, that combined with the User Activity API is incredibly handy. Especially useful to pull out when some anomaly occurs, and stakeholders suddenly want a particular conversion under the microscope (an unexpected enterprise user, unusually large order value, an unexpectedly frequent recurring customer, etc). That said, all of the browsers are becoming so aggressive about cookie management that relying on the Google-set clientID is asking for pain at this point, unless you've implemented something like this[1] cookie setting service/proxy/relay. Creating your own first-party identifier (even if it's just randomly generated the same as the GA clientID) and leveraging the user-id field is far more stable. > It seems there are still a lot of little tricks out there that aren't standard practice. Simo Ahava's blog (linked to in [1]) is a wealth of nifty web analytics tricks (primarily focused around Google Tag Manager, Google Analytics, and a sprinkling of Snowplow[2] for the self-hosted crowd). The blog is geared at a less technical audience, but the vast majority of content is around technical nuances of analytics implementations and fairly minor coding adjustments that can be made to significantly enhance a standard implementation. [1] https://www.simoahava.com/google-cloud/create-cookie-rewrite-web-service-google-cloud/ https://www.simoahava.com/google-cloud/create-cookie-rewrite... [2] https://snowplowanalytics.com/ https://snowplowanalytics.com/
  - hnick 6y ago
    In the near future tracking won't be as easy as throwing a script from Facebook into a blog header. I wonder where it's leading. One guess I had is people will be plugging in web service calls to get the info behind the scenes and generate a first party cookie. Not sure if that capability exists yet but it does sound like your first link so I'll have a read, thanks. Edit: I had a look through that first link, nice hack, but definitely out of reach of most small businesses. That's kind of how these things go, big players have the resources to jump a hurdle without slowing down, everyone else is left behind.

dmkii 6y ago

Nice work! Have you considered using localStorage instead of sessionStorage so it works across browser tabs as well?

nitrogen 6y ago
Does thay difference have implications under GDPR or California's new law?
- dmkii 6y ago
  No, it’s stored on the user’s own computer only. You could put an expiry date in there as well so you don’t accidentally use it after, say, 90 days.
gk1 6y ago
I did consider it recently, but decided against it as it would mix last-touch with last-tagged-touch attribution. If you fail to tag a campaign link it would be good for the conversion to not have data, so you recognize the error and tag the link. If I were to do localStorage I would only do it if the first touch and last touch tags (even if empty) were saved as separate values. That just means slightly more coding which I haven’t gotten around to. Pull requests welcome :)

mrgreenfur 6y ago

I made a startup to try and answer one question further: connect incoming traffic to conversion events and assign credit. This is where you'll get a real bottoms-up view of your marketing effectivness.