Touchpoints are moments of contact that a customer or visitor to your website has with your organisation or company. This could be visiting a specific webpage, making a purchase, or opening an email. Touchpoints are automatically added to a contact when the contact visits a URL that is tracked with website tracking and contains one of the five common UTM parameters. Therefore, it is important to have website tracking installed on every webpage you want to track.
This article will answer the following questions:
- How are touchpoints measured for attributions?
- What are UTM parameters?
- How do I set UTM parameters for emails?
How are touchpoints measured for attributions?
Attributions can only function properly if website tracking is set up correctly. Website tracking can 'measure' every visit your contacts make to your website and directly associate it with a contact already known in MailBlue. It allows you to segment your contacts based on website visits and/or start automations based on a website visit.
Attributions expand these capabilities by also measuring via the five common UTM parameters. The available parameters can examine a visitor's behaviour when a website URL is visited that contains one of those parameters. Visiting a website URL through this method is therefore seen as a 'touchpoint'.
What are UTM parameters?
UTM parameters are special parameters originally used by Google Analytics to measure which advertising channels, campaigns, keywords, and ads interacted with a user.
These parameters are simply a set of codes added to the end of a link. This tracking method has been used by various marketing platforms in a similar way to measure how ads and marketing campaigns perform and evolve.
The five UTM parameters are:
- utm_medium (For example: 'CPC', which stands for Cost Per Click)
- utm_source (For example: Facebook.com)
- utm_campaign (For example: 'US Newsfeed')
- utm_term (For example: 'Buy products here')
- utm_content (For example: 'ad banner')
Services like Google and Facebook offer a 'UTM-Builder' that can be used for free: here you can find Facebook's URL Builder and here you can find Google's URL Builder.
How do I set UTM parameters for emails?
MailBlue makes it easy to automatically use UTM parameters for all links in your email. This works the same way as enabling Google Analytics in the email summary.
All you need to do is ensure that the 'Google Analytics' switch is on for the email you want to send. Then, you can give the campaign a name, which will then match the 'utm_campaign' parameter.