How to Track Campaign URLs

You'll likely be interested in tracking external links that point inbound to your website. By "External", I am referring to links that are not within your site itself, but are outside your site pointing people to it. This can include:

Email campaigns
Ad campaigns (on Facebook, Adwords, etc.)
Other referral links you have control over posting (like Twitter or an affiliate)

There are three main ways to go about implementing these events and properties.

I. UTM Variables

If your links are already tagged with Google-style UTM variables, then great! When the visitor reaches your site, our JavaScript library reads the incoming URL and triggers an event Ad Campaign Hit with various Campaign ____ properties to classify what kind of Ad Campaign Hit it was.

Example

http://www.example.com/landing-page?utm_source=google&
  utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=march2012

Anyone who clicks the above link will land on http://www.example.com/landing-page and have this data recorded for them:

Event triggered: Ad Campaign Hit
Campaign Source: google
Campaign Medium: email
Campaign Name: march2012

Pros: It's easy to set up, especially if your ads are already tagged this way.
Cons: Every UTM-tagged URL is treated as an Ad Campaign Hit, which may not make sense if you want to easily separate UTM-tagged email newsletters or Feedburner RSS articles from your paid ads.

II. URL API

Our URL API lets you tag a link, so that anyone following that link triggers a KISSmetrics event. Just like with UTM variables, you do this by adding query strings to the destination URL. Unlike with UTM variables, you can do three main actions specific to KISSmetrics: record events, set properties, and identify people.

Example with Events and Properties

http://www.example.com/landing-page?kme=Followed+LP+Link&
  km_email+type=march2012

Anyone who clicks the above link will land on http://www.example.com/landing-page and have this data recorded for them:

Event triggered: Followed LP Link
Email type: march2012

Example with Identity

http://www.example.com/landing-page?kmi=example%40example.com

Whoever clicks on the above link will land on http://www.example.com/landing-page and will start the browsing session as example@example.com. (The %40 represents the @ symbol in URLs.)

III. Custom Solution

The last solution is to do everything custom. You can use JavaScript to get the document.URL and parse it for any parameters you're interested in passing to us. At which point, you can record that data using our basic record and set commands.

Pros: This is most extensible with whatever you're already using, especially affiliate links that don't fall into the above two categories.
Cons: This requires the most effort to set up.

Contributed by Eric Fung