Comment by famfamfam | Hacker News Reader

Comment by famfamfam | Hacker News Reader

I have always been uneasy about the fact that Urchin/Google Analytics 'campaign tags', when copied and distributed via other services, do not continue to represent the original campaign. For example, for the following campaign URL includes three additional pieces of information:

http://example.com/?utm_source=June%2B2011%2BNewsletter&...

Source: June 2011 Newsletter

Medium: Email

Campaign Name: Free Summer Tickets

The moment that you store that URL in other service, a number of those tags become incorrect anyway (it is not an email anymore), and the stats you will get from it will be tainted. Campaign tags are useful, but this approach by pinboard may end up in tracking being more accurate (certainly from in terms of tracking campaign media/terms/content), at the cost of removing the campaign name.

There is also little difference between this and a URL such as http://example.com/Free-Summer-Tickets/June-2011-Newsletter?... being set up to serve the original content other than at least with the campaign tags you've got a single canonical URL using the more correct query parameter mechanism.

Yes I think this is exactly what bothers me about it too. The fact that I use bookmarks and send links to others makes the information slightly skewed.

I also think, maybe I'm missing something. Maybe it's actually decent information to have. For instance, if you send a link with source=newsletter to somebody, it still is the newsletter that brought both of you to the site. You may not have visited otherwise. And your friend, probably even less so.

I don't know. I still don't like seeing it. It really does defeat the purpose of making your site have pretty links.

> The moment that you store that URL in other service, a number of those tags become incorrect anyway (it is not an email anymore), and the stats you will get from it will be tainted.

It sounds like you're probably misunderstanding the actual use case involved.

If you're a business, paying for traffic, you want to know ROI. If you spend X dollars and get Y visitors which make you Z dollars, you want Z > X, and you want to know what the relationship between the three values are, to know if spending more would be worthwhile. You don't actually care if the human being who clicked the link was currently in their email, rss, or anything else. You wan to know "spending dollars this way resulted in this profit". You want to identify the source, in your dollars, of your income.

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