Why Are Some Website Links So Long?
A basic intro to the world of UTM parameters
A basic intro to the world of UTM parameters
Think of an internet link—what‘s the first thing that comes to mind?
If you’re like most people, you probably think of the usual combination of “www.” followed by the website name and finished with “.com,” “.org,” or some appropriate ending.
But what you might not have realized is that companies can use their website links, often referred to as URLs, for much more than simply marking their digital territory. In fact, they can be valuable data gathering tools for marketers at those companies.
Enter UTM parameters.
UTM stands for Urchin Tracking Module and was born out of the earliest version of Google Analytics—called Urchin—and apparently, the name just stuck.
So what do they do? Fundamentally, UTM parameters enable digital marketers to track a variety of different, well, parameters that may be useful for digital businesses to keep tabs on. At the end of the day, this allows the marketer to run analytics that can provide useful insights into what, how, and where the digital community is engaging with their links. For a better explanation, here’s how Google describes them:
By adding campaign [UTM] parameters to the destination URLs you use in your ad campaigns, you can collect information about the overall efficacy of those campaigns, and also understand where the campaigns are more effective. For example, your Summer Sale campaign might be generating lots of revenue, but if you’re running the campaign in several different social apps, you want to know which of them is sending you the customers who generate the most revenue. Or if you’re running different versions of the campaign via email, video ads, and in-app ads, you can compare the results to see where your marketing is most effective. Wikipedia also has a simple breakdown of the five main UTM parameters that are commonly used today:
Source: WikipediaBut what do UTM parameters have to do with long URLs? Well, they’re exactly the reason *why *the links you share sometimes end up looking more like paragraphs than short website links.
UTM parameters get attached to the end of a URL (after the question mark) and once you start realizing what the different parameters mean, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to learn a bit more about the marketing objectives behind the link.
For example, say you get an email from a popular retailer showcasing their latest sale for 20% everything, storewide. You click on the button at the bottom of the email that says “Buy Now!”
Chances are the link you’re sent to won’t look like a basic URL:
www. ______ .com /shop.
Instead, it’ll probably look something more like this:
www. _____ . com /shop?utm_campaign=20offstorewide&utm_medium=email&utm_content=buynowbutton=utm_source=promo
Try this out yourself! Go to your email inbox, find a recent Promotional email, click on one of the links inside that email and see what the final link looks like. Can you suss out what marketing campaign they’re running? Maybe even how many iterations they have in the wild?
Finally, in an effort to reduce your (or the person your sending the link to) digital footprint, you can proactively erase everything after the question mark if you’d like to make those marketers’ lives a bit tougher to track you.
Originally published on Medium, April 11, 2019