Using Tokens for UTM Tags

If you use Marketo with Google Analytics, UTM tagging in emails is essential for tracking performance. However, managing UTM tags consistently can be challenging, especially with high email volumes. Using tokens makes this process much easier and helps ensure consistency.

Program Level Tokens

Setting up tokens at the program level is generally easiest, although tags like utm_medium and utm_content can be set at a top folder level to cascade down.

In this example, we have a new product email campaign. The tokens are created as text tokens in the My Tokens tab for the program, with the following values:

UTM Structure

For UTM values, we follow these conventions:

Medium

This is always set to email.

Campaign

This token reflects the campaign purpose. For this example, it is 2018-04-product-xyz.

Source

This token references the specific email. The token value ends with a hyphen, so we can add an email number, like xyz-email-010, for each unique email.

Content

Multiple tokens are used for content: text-link, image, and button. These allow tracking of click locations within emails.

Creating the Email

With tokenized products and UTM tags, creating links in emails becomes simple. Here are example URLs using tokens for product links:

https://{{my.url-product-x}}?{{my.medium}}&{{my.campaign}}&{{my.source}}010&{{my.text-link}}
https://{{my.url-product-y}}?{{my.medium}}&{{my.campaign}}&{{my.source}}010&{{my.text-link}}
https://{{my.url-product-z}}?{{my.medium}}&{{my.campaign}}&{{my.source}}010&{{my.text-link}}

HTML

Here’s what your email will look like in HTML:

Inbox

Here’s how the email will appear to recipients:

URL

Clicking the link should show the tokens populated correctly in the URL: