Which three campaign parameters are recommended to manually track campaigns?

If you want to manually track campaigns, there are three key campaign parameters you should pay special attention to: medium, source, and campaign. Let's have a look at each of them to ensure nothing essential is overlooked in your campaign tracking efforts.

Medium (utm_medium)

Essentially, this parameter defines which medium your visitors are using when visiting your website. This could be “paid-social”, in case you’re planning to launch a paid campaign on one of your social networks, “email”, or “cpc”.

This parameter is key to identifying which medium drives the most valuable traffic to your website and answering where you acquired your users from.

Source (utm_source)

The source parameter complements the medium by offering more granularity about the origin of website traffic. For instance, given that 'social' can represent various platforms, the source parameter is where you’ll be able to specify and narrow down the specific platform your visitors originated from (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc.). Combining source and medium facilitates filtering and grouping of traffic for better analysis, allowing you to compare different marketing forms within the same platform.

Campaign (utm_campaign)

The campaign parameter is crucial for accurately tracking website traffic, indicating the specific marketing campaign, promotion, or ad that triggered your visitors’ clicks. Given the multitude of campaigns that marketing teams typically handle simultaneously, this parameter provides the necessary detail to track and compare individual campaign performance.

However, managing campaign parameters can be challenging due to the potentially vast number of campaigns. That is why using unique and consistent naming conventions is key in getting their full reporting value, as this allows the whole team to understand and use them correctly and consistently, rather than falling into that vicious cycle of disorganization.

Fortunately, with support for UTM campaigns, mediums, sources, referrers, landings, and pages, Trackingplan helps you ensure error-free ROAS calculation by monitoring the correct functioning and attribution of your campaigns and marketing strategies.