No! and yes. Well it depends on what you want to do.
Lets say someone has a blog site called “theblogsite.com” and they are going to feature you in a blog post. So they write up an article and post it on their blog. Well it turns out, they get a lot of traffic and the blog post they wrote was terrific, so people are clicking on the link and going to “yoursite.com”.
Without using a special custom tracking link, how does iTracker360 record this? The quick short answer:
referral-theblogsite.com-/article/your-featured-post
This would be the resulting leadsource or tracking data if the blog author just used a basic link to your site without any special tracking parameters. A “referral” is the type of traffic, “theblogsite.com” is the domain from where they came from, and “/article/your-featured-post” is the location/page from the domain where they came from.
Let’s take another example, like Faceook. Lets say you spend some time writing up some great facebook posts. In total, you made four different posts. When someone reads the post and clicks on it, they’re taken to your site. If you use a standard link back to your site without any tracking parameters, then the how will iTracker360 record this?
Short answer: “referral-facebook.com”
This is great, but what if you would like to know out of the four postings you made, which one is generating the most leads? This is where you’ll need to use UTM parameters.
Here is an example of using UTM parameters to help you track which post is creating the most leads:
Post1: https://yoursite.com/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=post1
Post2: https://yoursite.com/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=post2
Post3: https://yoursite.com/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=post3
and so on.
The tracking data captured for each of these posts would be something like “social-facebook-post1” or “social-facebook-post2” depending on which post they clicked on. You might want to be more descriptive than just using ‘post1’ or ‘post2’, but hopefully you get the point that you can differentiate between posts by using parameters like this.
UTM parameters are great for tracking different posts on Facebook and they’re also heavily used in Google Adwords and other advertising platforms. But for basic blog posts or forum posts being made on websites that you have no control over, iTracker360 can still record that traffic as a referral from whichever site they came from.
Another good example of when to use UTM parameters is inside Email links. Most traffic coming from an Email will be recorded as ‘direct’ since there is no website referral information. So if you have an affiliate sending out emails to their list, it’s a good idea to use UTM parameters for this links.