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Can I unify UTM URLs in Adobe Analytics?

Forum|Forum|2 years ago
August 11, 2023
2 replies
3160 views

As far as I know my UTM implementation in AA is correctly done. However, if I draw a report of page name -> page URL, the UTM URLs are listed as if they are a different URLs for that page. Technically this makes sense, but this behavior is different in Google Analytics, which leads to confusion for users experienced in GA. Because in GA the URLs containing UTM tags are all unified under the page URL. Is that possible to achieve in AA too? Examples below.

How it works in Google Analytics:

User 1 accesses this URL: www.carpage.com

User 2 accesses this URL: www.carpage.com?utm_source=tag

Report

Page name: Car Page (2 visits)

URL: www.carpage.com (2 visits)

How it works in Adobe Analytics:

User 1 accesses this URL: www.carpage.com

User 2 accesses this URL: www.carpage.com?utm_source=tag

Report

Page name: Car Page (2 visits)

URL: www.carpage.com (1 visit)

URL: www.carpage.com?utm_source=tag (1 visit)

Analytics

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Best answer by Jennifer_Dungan

This is completely up to you!

First off, Adobe uses "Page Name" as the primary identifier... so if your pages have been given proper names (not URL) the data will roll up to the name:

Now.. Since URL (or at least the URL as it appears in your reporting) is a custom field, you can control if you want to track the "Full URL" (contains UTMs) or the "URL without Parameters" (i.e. truncate all parameters from the URL value), or the "Canonical URL" (which may not even point to the same site you are on, but another site in your network where the content is shared), or any combination of the above... (I have a combination).

You can also create classifications on the "Full URL" to truncate out the Parameters and roll up to just the "URL without Parameters"

Now, for my UTMs, I use a concatenated version of all the parameters and track it in my standard "Campaign Codes" tracking (which is set to 1 Week Attribution), I also have eVars dedicated to each UTM separately (one for UTM Source, one for UTM Medium, etc)... each of these is set to a Visit level expiry (I can always use custom attribution on the fly to see longer if needed). So now I can see each of my UTMs in isolation.

Also, don't forget about your Marketing Channel rules to group your different driving factors, including UTMs into buckets.

Jennifer_Dungan

Accepted solution

Community Advisor and Adobe Champion

This is completely up to you!

First off, Adobe uses "Page Name" as the primary identifier... so if your pages have been given proper names (not URL) the data will roll up to the name:

Now.. Since URL (or at least the URL as it appears in your reporting) is a custom field, you can control if you want to track the "Full URL" (contains UTMs) or the "URL without Parameters" (i.e. truncate all parameters from the URL value), or the "Canonical URL" (which may not even point to the same site you are on, but another site in your network where the content is shared), or any combination of the above... (I have a combination).

You can also create classifications on the "Full URL" to truncate out the Parameters and roll up to just the "URL without Parameters"

Now, for my UTMs, I use a concatenated version of all the parameters and track it in my standard "Campaign Codes" tracking (which is set to 1 Week Attribution), I also have eVars dedicated to each UTM separately (one for UTM Source, one for UTM Medium, etc)... each of these is set to a Visit level expiry (I can always use custom attribution on the fly to see longer if needed). So now I can see each of my UTMs in isolation.

Also, don't forget about your Marketing Channel rules to group your different driving factors, including UTMs into buckets.

B

BernardoCFAuthor

Level 4

Thanks for the response. This is all nice to hear, but the fact is documentation is lacking everywhere. I have no idea how to implement or fix based on what you are saying. A search on Google for canonical url adobe analytics, returns no documentation from Adobe.

Could you please shed some light on how the following can be achieved?

Now.. Since URL (or at least the URL as it appears in your reporting) is a custom field, you can control if you want to track the "Full URL" (contains UTMs) or the "URL without Parameters" (i.e. truncate all parameters from the URL value), or the "Canonical URL" (which may not even point to the same site you are on, but another site in your network where the content is shared), or any combination of the above... (I have a combination).

You can also create classifications on the "Full URL" to truncate out the Parameters and roll up to just the "URL without Parameters"

Jennifer_Dungan

Community Advisor and Adobe Champion

There is no "default" plugin for canonical... This would just be a simple Javascript custom code, first hit for me was this stack overflow:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5980682/obtaining-canonical-url-using-javascript

document.querySelector("link[rel='canonical']").getAttribute("href");

^ of course, this assumes that your site is setting a proper canonical on every page.

On my site, to be safe, I added a fall back that if no canonical was set, then I take the current URL and truncate off the query string parameters.

So, assuming you want canonical, then you can use a custom code Data Element like:

var finalURL = window.document.querySelector("link[rel='canonical']").getAttribute("href");

if (!finalURL){
  var current = window.document.location.href;
 // or if you already have the current URL as a DataElement, then use var current = _satellite.getVar('data element name for url');
  finalURL = current.substring(0, current.indexOf('?'));
}

return finalURL;

If you don't want to use Canonical as your tracking, then to truncate the query params, you can just use:

var current = window.document.location.href;
// or if you already have the current URL as a DataElement, then use var current = _satellite.getVar('data element name for url');
var finalURL = current.substring(0, current.indexOf('?'));

return finalURL;

If you aren't comfortable with JavaScript, I don't know if your company should consider having one or more developers available to you as a resource, or to hire an implementation specialist.... At this point, being able to use resources you already have would be the cheapest option... just someone who can work with you when you need to do custom scripting and to review your work.

leocwlau

Community Advisor and Adobe Champion

Most of the Adobe Analytics implementations have a logic to convert URL into page name by removing parameters and/or other types of transformation as necessary, now and more commonly hash for SPA. If you don't want to build your own logic, you may consider using getPageName plugin which can be very handy.

B

BernardoCFAuthor

Level 4

Where and how is this logic implemented please?

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