Add Third Party Tracking Parameters to Open Time Email Campaigns

Urchin Tracking Module (UTM) parameters are tags that you can add to the end of a URL to track its performance and know its traffic sources. Adding UTM parameters to URLs in your Open Time Email Campaigns can give you more detailed insights into your campaign's performance. While Marketing Cloud Personalization provides analytics and full campaign performance reporting, you can still use your existing web analytics system to monitor clickthrough traffic with your Open Time Email campaigns. To learn more about how you can combine third-party tracking data with data from Personalization, talk to your Salesforce account representative.

This article describes how to use UTM parameters with Open Time Email Campaigns. To know more about Open Time Email Campaigns, or how to create one, see Open Time Email Campaigns on Salesforce Help. Before reading the instructions in this article, make sure you've created or cloned an Open Time Email campaign, tested it, and have its HTML code open in front of you.

To add UTM parameters to your emails, do the following.

  1. Access the Open Time Email campaign within the Campaign Edit screen in the Personalization UI. For detailed instructions on accessing the Campaign Edit screen, see Create an Open Time Email Campaign on Salesforce Help.

  2. Click SIMULATE > Show HTML.

  3. Identify the URLs to track in your email campaign. We recommend tracking URLs for item recommendations included in your email template along with any other URLs of importance.

  4. Append UTM parameters at the end of each identified URL, starting with and separated by the & symbol. Excluding the & symbol breaks the URL and leads to improper tracking. For example, if the URL of an item in your email is https://demo.evergage.com/api/dataset/engage/campaign/YnFdJ/N7pF1/1/detail?userId=@@USER_ID@@, add the UTM parameters at the end of the URL as shown in the following example.

After you've added UTM parameters to all relevant URLs, use the updated campaign HTML with your email marketing solution to send your campaign to recipients. With the UTM parameters you added, you can track your campaign's clickthrough rates directly in your web analytics system.

To ensure that URLs resolve correctly, you must encode all non-ASCII characters and the following reserved ASCII characters when using them in UTM parameters.

ASCII CharacterURL Encoding
!%21
#%23
$%24
'%27
(%28
)%29
*%2A
+%2B
,%2C
/%2F
:%3A
;%3B
=%3D
?%3F
@%40
[%5B
|%5C
]%5D

The following code sample contains HTML for a row of three item recommendations in an Open Time Email campaign. This sample HTML is for illustrative purposes only and includes an illustrative dynamic variable @@USER_ID@@ for userId. Your email marketing solution could use a different dynamic variable format.

Depending on your email marketing solution, you may have to modify the item and item image URLs in your Open Time Email campaign. For more information on capturing and modifying campaign URLs, refer to Capture an Open Time Email Campaign URL.

The goal of this example is to track the traffic source of item URLs in the campaign. To do so, we'll append the UTM parameters utm_source=newsletter, utm_medium=email, and utm_campaign=lead_generation at the end of each item URL, after detail?userId=@@USER_ID@@".

The sample campaign HTML after adding UTM parameters to each item URL is as shown in the following example.