How our UTM codes work

If you want to know how much traffic we send you, normally you’d use the referrer, but in this case we’re mostly read by email, so the referrer would look like a webmail service - or even be blank.

So, we try to help websites know when we send them traffic by tagging links from our newsletter and website with UTM codes. These are mainly used by Google Analytics, but other services can use them too.

Here’s a link to Google, so you can see how this looks. In this case, it’ll go to google.com/?utm_source=podnews.net&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=podnews.net:2019-11-20

Our UTM codes look like…

Source

utm_source=podnews.net - our source is always podnews.net

Medium

utm_medium=newsletter - this can be one of the following:

• newsletter - someone’s using their email
• web - someone’s using our website
• rss - someone’s using our show-notes or our full RSS feed
• unknown - for some links, we’re unable to add this code

Campaign

utm_campaign=podnews:2019-11-18

• podnews will be links from our editorial
• (your campaign name) will be used in classifieds and sponsorship, so you can monitor how well different pieces of copy work
• supporter will be links from our wonderful supporters
• podcast-page are links from our podcast pages. We use other similarly obvious campaign names for some other pages we produce
• :2019-11-18, where present, will be the date that we first published the piece (i.e. the publish date on the website). It’s in the format of YYYY-MM-DD.

If you supply us with your own Google Analytics tags, they will overwrite these.

Users of our classifieds section can get a full post-campaign analysis by using your classifieds dashboard; if you’re a title or section sponsor, we’ll send you a post campaign analysis a few weeks after your sponsorship completes, if you ask.