Tracking Marketing Performance with Your eCommerce

Urchin Tracking Module (UTM) codes are very common and broadly used to track website clicks and the performance of marketing activities.

August 30, 2021

Urchin Tracking Module (UTM) codes were originally developed by Urchin, a web statistics analysis company that was acquired by Google Inc. and since evolved into Google Analytics. UTM tracking codes are very common and broadly used to track website clicks and the performance of marketing activities.

There are multiple ways we track these codes to allow you to really monitor the metrics of your digital marketing campaigns and to track which campaigns are driving customers to your site. Where previously you have had to log into Google Analytics or Facebook to check your advertising campaign stats, StoreConnect brings all of that information into your Salesforce environment, allowing you to produce accurate and timely reports to monitor your ROI.

It works like this: When a visitor arrives at a StoreConnect site, any UTM parameters present in the link they use to get to the store are saved against their browser session. Your customer might put one item in their cart and then go looking again at different things before coming back to complete the cart. The UTM parameters are recorded over any number of visits to your store until the checkout is complete or in the case of the user restarting their browser.

If the visitor accesses the store again with other UTM parameters, these will be added to their existing ones. This helps build a complete story of how the customer arrived at the purchase of their order.

When a Cart is updated by that visitor (items are added or the quantity is changed) any UTM parameters in their browser session are also added to their Cart. If the Cart is cleared, the UTM parameters are removed from the Cart.

When a visitor places an Order, or if the cart is saved as an abandoned cart, the UTM parameters in the Cart are saved against the Order, viewable through the Order Campaign related list in the Order layout. This is how campaigns can be tracked from the referral through to Order.

Learn more about how StoreConnect and UTM tracking codes work together here.

“Previously we were trying to use Google Analytics to track online gifts and measure the ROI of our marketing efforts. That’s a complex task for a marketing team of just one person. The StoreConnect team helped develop a way to bring the industry standard tracking codes right into Salesforce when an order is placed. Now, we can view all of our giving analytics within the Salesforce platform.”

– Devlin Donaldson, CEO VisionTrust