Tracking data has always been a passion for me in marketing and UTMs are always necessary to ensure you get the best tracking on your marketing efforts. The downside is that you can create different data paths if you don't have a standardized UTM setup and letting teammates build on their own has had many errors in my experience. An example, utm_source=linkedin and utm_source=LinkedIn would be two separate paths when looking in an analytics platform. I've also seen some CRMs not be able to pickup the different capitalized letters if those weren't clearly stated in a campaign's logic. This has made it difficult (and more manual) to keep data as clean as possible which I've seen happen at startups all the way up to large enterprise companies.
One aspect that can't be skipped is aligning with the rest of your organization on what the definitions of each UTM field are and making sure they are aware of each selection for each field. We have clear selections for both our utm_source & utm_medium to ensure these always have the proper taggings and the utm_campaign is an optional field just to be able to drill in further. We've created and continually updated a spreadsheet for all known source and mediums we have in our marketing strategies. So where does Glean fit in?
We use that updated spreadsheet mentioned before in one of our Glean prompts! We also place some examples in this spreadsheet for the output to know what a typical UTM string looks like. Now, we can just share a simple prompt with colleagues that has clear instructions on what fields to fill in:
- What channel is sending the visitor? [input channel name] (example: LinkedIn, Google, YouTube)
- What tactic is being used? [input tactic] (example: Paid social, Organic social, Paid search)
- What is the campaign or messaging? [input campaign name] (example: Monthly newsletter, Retail whitepaper Q2, Product announcement)
- Where is this traffic going? [insert landing page URL]
Once the fields are added, you can run the prompt! This will now run through your spreadsheet of all UTM values you designated, look at examples of the UTM strings you've provided in the sheet, and standardize your UTM string to align to an acceptable format with a landing page URL already appended with your new UTMs. Using the UTM examples, it will correct a capitalized "LinkedIn" to be "linkedin" based off the values in the sheet being crawled. No more stray UTMs, no more overthinking UTM creation, and now providing a straightforward UTM building experience for folks that are experienced with UTMs and also those who are not!
I call this a small but mighty prompt because it has helped me educate colleagues on what UTMs are, show the proper way to setup UTMs, and be able to maintain clean and consistent data for my marketing efforts.
