How can we recognise which article is recommended or which is not ?

Question

Hi everyone! I have a question... assume that a media publisher web page has recommended article on their pages and also has regular articles as a suggested default on same page. In this case both seem to have normal urls and it looks like a recommended link, while one is actually a regular article in the web site, not a recommended one.. Is there a way to distinguish between these two and measure the click on recommended one only?

Jennifer_Dungan · Accepted Answer

Except that you really shouldn't be using UTMs on internal links.. UTMs should only be used on a external links.

https://www.searchseven.co.uk/blog/why-using-utm-parameters-on-internal-links-is-a-very-bad-idea/

https://www.adviso.ca/en/blog/tech-en/never-never-never-tag-internal-link-external-campaign-variable-utm_campaign/

https://www.monsterinsights.com/docs/track-internal-links-google-analytics/

If you are going to use a URL parameter, you should create a new (or multiple) internal campaign trackers (icid, or itm_source, itm_campaign, etc).

First off, it's just bad practice to mix internal and external campaigns... but many of us use Google Analytics as a backup analytics package, and using UTMs incorrectly like this will impact your GA data collection.

Jennifer_Dungan · Answer

Depending on how you want to do this, you could add a click tracking on the Recommended articles, so that you can correlate those clicks to subsequent reads...

Or if you are using Activity Map, you could modify the regions to indicate "recommended", thereby saving you the extra server call, and using Activity Map Region to determine that the user clicked on recommended content.

Or you could modify the urls of the recommended content to use an internal campaign parameter (icid instead of cid, or itms instead of utms, etc)... you would have to add new custom dimensions to track the internal campaign.

There are many ways to go about this... but based on your existing tagging structure some of these may work/fit better with your tagging design.

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