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So hi everyone.
Thank you for joining on a Friday.
Uh, I really appreciate it.
Um, today we're walking through the UTM parameters in Salesforce Marketing Cloud, which, um, is the email naming convention for your email messages .
Um, we noticed in our quarterly audit that we do of Marketing Cloud emails that there were a lot of common pretty minor mistakes, um, in the naming convention.
Um, and we just wanted to kind of address it as a group, um, because we realize that it's pretty difficult to remember, especially if you're someone who doesn't touch it so often or you've been using it for a long time and maybe fell into a pattern.
Um, so we're really breaking it down in this workshop and talking through each piece and part of the UTM.
So what are UTM parameters?
A lot of you probably already know this, but we'll just go back to basics.
The UTM parameters are added at the end of a URL.
Um, they identify the campaign that refers traffic to a website and they help us to track the effectiveness of our digital marketing efforts, um, in Google Analytics.
So this is a link here that I grabbed from, um, on campus.
So this is what shows up at the end of all of the links in our emails after they're sent out.
Um, and you can see here the different pieces and parts.
So we have the UTM source, the medium, the campaign, and also the Salesforce Marketing Cloud key.
So how does this work in Marketing Cloud?
Um, marketing Cloud automatically adds, uh, that source medium and marketing cloud key.
The source is always going to be Salesforce Marketing Cloud pretty straightforward and the medium's always email.
Um, and then the Salesforce marketing cloud key is an individual identifier.
So that also helps with tracking 'cause we can see actually like which individual clicked on a link.
Um, and then the name of your email is what becomes the UTM campaign.
So that's why using the naming convention is so important because that is how we're going to identify on the Google Analytics side where that traffic came from.
So a couple of tips to know first, and this is a lot of what the common mistakes lead back to, so that's why I wanted to shout these out.
Um, the UTM perimeter needs to be all lowercase.
So when you're e naming your email, everything in lowercase especially, or not especially, but um, also the FY in fiscal year, I think that's a common one 'cause we're all used to um, capitalizing it everywhere else.
But in this case we need it lowercase.
Um, we also want to separate the sections of the campaign tag and this will make more sense as we look at the structure, but we wanna separate the sections with underscores.
But if we have words or numbers within sections, those can be separated by hyphens or you can just not separate them at all.
Um, but yeah, we'll take a look at that so that that can make more sense.
And also this is very informal.
Just jump in with questions if you have them or drop them in the chat.
Okay, so this is the breakdown of the UTM campaign structure.
Um, and so this is also the naming convention for emails.
Um, and each different color here in the structure is a section.
And then within the section you can see sometimes there are hyphens in between words.
So that first section is your unit code.
The second section is your marketing activity, and that's made up of two parts that we'll talk about later.
Um, the third section is fiscal year.
And then the last section is additional qualifiers, which will also really break down.
So the unit code I know is very straightforward for a lot of you, um, but sometimes it's not so easy.
So your unit code is the shorthand assigned to your college or unit and if your unit rolls up into a larger unit, you're likely using that code or a modified version of that code.
So I put some examples here.
Um, but yeah, some of you might know, like I'll use an example here, um, because I used to be in EHE, so I'm gonna pick on them for a moment.
Um, there is a department of teaching and learning in EHE you wouldn't use a shorthand code for teaching and learning.
You would use the shorthand code for EAG because your department sits within that college.
Okay?
So the next part is marketing activity and um, the, this is made up of basically like two different pieces, but they are within the same section.
Those pieces will be separated by a hyphen rather than an underscore.
Um, the first piece is audience and we have a specific audience code chart for you to select from when you're picking out your audience.
And you're always free to reach out to us if you feel that your audience is missing from this chart.
And that way we can um, you know, notify our analytics team to say, okay, we're gonna start adding this, um, to our tracking to look for this audience when we're looking at Google Analytics.
So that's why there's kind of a predetermined list.
We wanna make sure we're looking out for the right audiences.
Um, another common one that we see is right now we're tracking faculty and staff together with a hyphen.
Um, so even if your email is only going to faculty or only going to staff, we still wanna just put faculty staff together with a hyphen and it can kind of be determined from there.
Um, that's sort of what the additional qualifier piece is for when we get to that.
Um, and this list by the way, is not all of the audiences.
This is just like kind of a sampling to show you the range that we have.
So I would definitely suggest checking out that audience code chart to see the full range.
Um, and then the second part of the marketing activity is the email type.
And this is the full list of email types.
Um, we keep it pretty tight.
Um, and again, you can always reach out to the team if you feel that there's something missing.
Um, and we can see if that's something that warrant's being added to the list for Google Analytics to be looking at.
Um, but our types of emails are awareness, um, event newsletter, recruitment, solicitation and survey.
And I just wanna shout out that solicitation is specifically for making like very pointed asks for funds.
Um, so that one is very specific.
Uh, a lot of times our emails fall under awareness and that's okay.
It's okay if every single email you send out falls under awareness.
Um, it's a pretty broad one.
Okay, any questions about that section?
Okay, I'm gonna move on to fiscal year.
This one's very straightforward.
Like I said, the biggest issue I see here is um, maybe at the start of the fiscal year we forget to switch over or um, you know, we see a capitalization of that fy but you know, right now we're in fiscal year 24, but um, fiscal year 25 starts pretty soon at um, July 1st.
So just wanna make a note of that.
And then now we are to additional qualifiers.
So additional qualifiers are the optional fourth section of your UTM campaign or your email name.
And these are useful if you need to further define the email's purpose beyond those pre-defined lists that we just looked at.
So we separate each qualifier with a hyphen and remember the fourth section as a whole is separated from fiscal year by an underscore.
So you can kind of see that breakdown in the example at the bottom.
So I have a unit code, then the audience and the email type separated by a hyphen, then underscore fiscal year, then underscore, and then our two qualifiers here are monthly-june.
And notice both of those are separated by a hyphen.
So we have some general additional qualifiers that our analytics team has shared with us that are common ones.
So that's things like date, if you have a recurring newsletter, it's very common to use the month or the date.
And then location, if your information is specific to a campus, so like Mansfield, Newark, Wooster, et cetera.
The name of a specific event or a degree program.
And also the sequence of the email.
So if it's the first invitation, second invitation, et cetera.
So those are just some ideas.
But again, the qualifiers are really up to you for how you want to identify that email beyond those predetermined lists.
Okay.
So I put a couple examples here of how this would look when it's all put together.
So the first one is an EHE graduate recruitment email from fiscal year 24.
So we have EHE as the unit code, then grad hyphen recruitment as that marketing activity section, underscore fy24, and then underscore and we have our qualifiers summer-2023.
So that's just an example there.
And then the second example is a non-degree awareness message for fiscal year 25.
So we have our unit code, then our audience non-deg hyphen awareness as that email type, then fy25.
And again, that's lowercase because all of this needs to be lowercase.
Okay.
Any questions about the qualifiers or looking at the email names all put together?
Awesome.
So if you are looking at these and you're thinking, okay, this is a lot to remember, we actually have a naming convention generator for you.
And this is like an Excel spreadsheet.
And basically what you do is you select each individual section from a drop-down menu and it'll spit out the name for you.
So that way you don't even have to worry about the dashes or underscores or anything like that.
It'll do it all for you.
And that's located in our resource center.
And then I also added this checklist because it's nice to just kind of quickly check before you send.
Everything in lowercase.
No spaces.
Underscores between each section.
Hyphens within each section.
The unit code is correct.
Audience and email type is from that standard list.
And the fiscal year matches the date of the send.
And this is a big one.
So if you are working on an email at the end of June, so say at end of June working on an email that you plan to send in July, you want your email name to include the fiscal year 25 rather than 24, even though you're working on it in fiscal year 24.
Okay.
Any other questions?
Thank you everyone for coming.
Um, it's all the details and email, right?
Everything's nuanced, everything's super detailed and we appreciate you attending.