Tag Archives: code

How I use utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign from Google Analytics

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My friend Adam called me this evening to ask how I’ve used the Google Analytics tracking codes utm_source, utm_medium, and utm_campaign. He’s working on an app to help marketers generate HTML e-mails, and is thinking about automating the inclusion of these tracking codes.

The utm_medium is pretty straightforward in that the medium would be values like email, web, twitter, rss, and so on.

But, what’s the difference between utm_source and utm_campaign?

Google’s documentation on these variables is helpful in general, but is not all that clear on the difference between these two variables.

So, here’s how I think of those variables. The utm_source is like a noun, and utm_campaign is like an adjective. The utm_source will be more consistent from one edition to another, while the utm_campaign will change.

Let’s look at an example. Let’s say I send an e-mail newsletter called Brilliant Widgets every season (Spring, Summer, Fall, and Winter), and I want to track how many links back to my website each edition generates. Here are the utm_* values I would use.

utm_* values for the Winter edition of Brilliant Widgets

utm_source Brilliant_Widgets
utm_campaign Winter_2011
utm_medium email

So, the href value of the link back to my website would look like this: http://blog.davingranroth.com/?utm_source=Brilliant_Widgets&utm_campaign=Winter_2011&utm_medium=email

Now, assuming I use those parameters on the links back to my website and that my website activity is being tracked with Google Analytics, I’ll be able use Google Analytics to identify website visits that came from that e-mail newsletter. Then for the next edition, I would keep utm_source and utm_medium the same, but update to utm_campaign=Spring_2012.

With this thinking, you could define a set of values for all the e-mails you send out, and create a system that would help you know what those values should be when you introduce new online publications.

I’m sure that other people and companies have come up with their own approaches to using these utm_* values.

I’m curious, does anyone else have different ideas or examples to share?

Small-caps, web text, and CSS

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There’s a trick to getting small-caps to work on the web, and it’s counter-intuitive.

Let’s say you had an abbreviation, like CSS, that you wanted to put into small-caps, say with a little extra tracking. You might think you could use the CSS property font-variant: small-caps, and you’d be good to go. Not so.

Here’s why. Because for small-caps to work, you need to start with lowercase letters.

However, when you’re simply typing your thoughts out before you’ve decided on small-caps for abbreviations, acronyms, etc., you probably typed those abbreviations in uppercase.

So, when you tried small-caps, it simply didn’t work. For example, see this web page from 2005 that Joe Clark wrote to test small-caps. Note how the small-caps versions are more like regular capital letters. Not cool. It makes the hack look good, which is bad.

So, here’s what you can do (and what I think browsers ought to be doing automatically anyway):

  1. First apply text-transform: lowercase
  2. Then apply font-variant: small-caps

That ought to do it.

Here’s a more specific example of the CSS.

abbr, acronym {
text-transform: lowercase;
font-variant: small-caps;
letter-spacing: 1px;
}

The problem with the line break (BR) tag

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We’ve got the <br /> tag all wrong. It’s time to make it right.

We all know the <br /> tag is used to insert a line break in HTML. But what we’ve been missing is that we were too often after something else. Let me explain.

Common reasons to use line breaks

Why would a web writer interrupt a passage of text with a forced line break? Here are a few possibilities.

  • Trying to avoid an orphan
  • Inserting a line break before a 2-word proper noun, like “American Airlines,” so the noun isn’t split
  • Formatting content like a mailing address

The problem with line breaks (<br /> tags)

Forcing a line to break in a document that will be printed is a no-brainer. But web writing has different constraints that we shouldn’t ignore.

Copy on the web has the luxury and burden of being portable. That text can show up anywhere:

  • in an e-mail message
  • on some other web page
  • in an RSS reader
  • copied and pasted into a Tweet
  • in a web browser on a mobile phone

This means that the line length you wrote your text for is simply not reliable. You need to consider how that text will show up in other places too, at unknown line lengths.

A line break may look fine on your screen, but it might look really awkward when that text appears somewhere else beyond your control.

Instead of splitting text, stick text together

Orphans

Avoid orphans especially where the text is most likely to appear, but relax. You can’t prevent them altogether.

Instead of inserting a line break, opt to rephrase the text to change the length and prevent the orphan. But realize that when that text appears elsewhere, it might just have an orphan.

You also have the option of a special white-space character called a non-breaking space. In HTML, it looks like this: &nbsp;. When you put a non-breaking space between two words, those two words will always be on the same line of text.

2+ word proper nouns

If you want to be sure that “American Airlines” remains on the same line in body text, employ a sprinkle of CSS magic. In the markup, a corporate name should be contained within a span element, like this:

<span class="brand_name">American Airlines</span>

And then to make sure that those two words stay on the same line, add a line like this to your CSS file.

.brand_name {white-space: nowrap;}

That will prevent the brand name text from being split at the end of a line. Instead, both words will flip to the next line if there is not enough room for them on the current line of text.

Formatting content like mailing addresses

In this case, I’m actually okay with using <br /> tags. But, left to my own devices, I might use some different markup and some CSS instead.

Let’s say we have an address like this fictional one.

Samuel Clemens
1835 Huckleberry Row
Hannibal, MO 63401

You could just put that text in an address element and use line breaks.

Or you could mark it up in the hcard microformat, and then think about styling it based on that markup. So, it might instead be coded like this.

<address class="vcard">
<span class="fn">Samuel Clemens</span>
<span class="street-address">1835 Huckleberry Row</span>
<span class="locality">Hannibal</span>,
<abbr title="Missouri" class="region">MO</abbr>
<span class="postal-code">63401</span>
</address>

And then a little bit of CSS like this would take care of the line breaks.

.vcard .fn,
.vcard .street-address{
display: block;
}

The point: we overuse line breaks because they don’t require any extra thought

Instead, let’s consider why we actually want a line break the next time we go to use one. There’s probably a better option once you realize that you don’t actually want to break a line of text, you really just want some of the text to stick together.