To help measuring the effect of marketing campaigns etc. used to attract participants to events conducted in Virtual Hive, the platform comes with built-in support for capturing and exchanging UTM parameters. This document describes the possibilities.
Document history
Version: 1.0
Date: February 27th 2024
Comments: First version
Capture of UTM Parametres
UTM parameters are five variants of URL parameters used by marketers to track the effectiveness of online marketing campaigns across traffic sources and publishing media. The five parameters are:
- utm_source
- utm_medium
- utm_campaign
- utm_term
- utm_content
The UTM parameters can be appended to the website URL, allowing various systems to capture these. The Virtual Hive platform is no exception, meaning that when one of more UTM parameters are added to the hive URL, these will automatically be captured as a part of the registration process as explained in the following.
Starting with an example the following illustrates how the registration page in Virtual Hive might look.
If we imagine that a person clicks on this URL; https://producttour.virtualhive.live?utm_campaign=linkedin&utm_medium=banner, that person will land on registration page shown. If the person in question chooses to enter in this case name and email and press 'Register', any UTM parameters in the URL will automatically be saved together with the information entered, i.e., in this case campaign=linkedIn and medium=banner.
Inside the Virtual Hive platform, the UTM parameters are represented by visitor fields (metadata) and thus all hives come with the following 5 visitor fields:
Please notice, that these visitor fields can be used like all other visitor fields, but no actions are required to support the functionality described in this document.
Access to UTM parametres
Currently, there are 2 ways of getting access to values of UTM parameters:
- Include these in any exchange with external (CRM) systems.
- Request data report containing these.
Exchange with external systems
The flexible architecture of the Virtual Hive platform makes integrations to external systems like Salesforce, MS Dynamics and even proprietor platforms easy. The platform allows for both pull and push of data, where pushing data from the Virtual Hive platform to an external API at a regular interval is the most common use case. Including participant centric data including UTM parameters is thus a well-known option.
It should be noted that several existing integrations already exists which can used as templates. Furthermore, it should also be noted, that the experience so far is, that specific customer integrations often require some level of adjustment, as data, format, security etc. differs.
Data Report
As Admin user on the Virtual Hive platform, it is possible (Statistics -> CSV export) to request different data reports in CSV format. Some of these also include any UTM parameters.