Urchin Tracking Module was an analytics package that Google acquired way back when.
UTM defines a set of query parameters that Google Analytics, and other web analytics platforms, use to capture and provide and information about a referring source (or 'channel') to a webpage. At the highest-level, the buckets are direct, organic, referrer, social, email, display, and paid search.
The three UTM parameters that are required to track 'campaigns' in a web analytics tool, such as Google Analytics:, are Utm_Source, Utm_Medium, and Utm_Campaign.
If you clicked on the link above, it would inform stilldrinking.org's Google Analytics property that you, the visitor, came from Facebook and are part of the 'jan-15-hn-woop-woop' campaign.
Unfortunately, this won't work for any analytics platform that uses first interaction attribution, which most do. That means, they'll immediately store the first value seen and treat that as the "source" for the visit. Changing it will tweak per visit parameters, but won't really affect most people.
Still cool, but a better solution would be to make a plugin that mangles them before the request is sent :)
Worst of all is when these are used in cache keys especially when some of these get unique values. I did write a simple Nginx set of rules to strip this off when used in the cache key or sending to the backend. Here's a fragment: https://gist.github.com/nikolay/e58fb0de98acd8aed932
I was expecting something Mapping/GIS related, given [1], but maybe that's just the mental scar-tissue from a previous project involving various data sources that were in formats not quite entirely unlike the ones they purported to actually be. Which meant, along with one incredibly badly designed viewer application, I could legitimately say "I spent almost an hour dragging myself out of the ocean" in a worklog entry :P
Back in a previous life I used to work for a software company in the defense/GIS space. It's pretty incredible how much labour goes in to making the earth somehow representable as a series of X, Y and Z tuples. The difference between floating and fixed point could mean being off by dozens of metres.
Stands for "Urchin Tracker Module". E.gs include utm_medium, utm_campaign etc These are query params marketers include in URLs to keep track of which campaigns visitors come from. Most analytics platforms automatically capture these parameters so that they can be analyzed later.
Urchin Tracking Module was an analytics package that Google acquired way back when.
UTM defines a set of query parameters that Google Analytics, and other web analytics platforms, use to capture and provide and information about a referring source (or 'channel') to a webpage. At the highest-level, the buckets are direct, organic, referrer, social, email, display, and paid search.
The three UTM parameters that are required to track 'campaigns' in a web analytics tool, such as Google Analytics:, are Utm_Source, Utm_Medium, and Utm_Campaign.
Example: http://stilldrinking.org/utms/utm-mangler.html?utm_medium=so...
If you clicked on the link above, it would inform stilldrinking.org's Google Analytics property that you, the visitor, came from Facebook and are part of the 'jan-15-hn-woop-woop' campaign.