Using Tokens for UTM Tags

If you are using Marketo and Google Analytics, hopefully you are using UTM tags within your emails to track your emails back to web visits. If you send a lot of emails like I do, it can be difficult to remain consistent in your tagging practices, or even miss tagging them all together. Luckily, using tokens can make this much easier.

Program Level Tokens

I find it easiest to create tokens at the program level, although certain tags like utm_ medium and utm_content could be set at the top most folder and cascade down.

In this example, we are sending an email out about some new products we received in stock. I created a new program called zz-marketing program and clicked on the My Tokens tab. These are all text tokens as they will be used in the URL.

Type	Token Name	Value
Text	{{my.button}}	utm_content=button
Text	{{my.campaign}}	utm_campaign=2018-04-product-xzy
Text	{{my.image}}	utm_content=image
Text	{{my.medium}}	utm_medium=email
Text	{{my.source}}	utm_source=xzy-eml-
Text	{{my.text-link}}	utm_content=text-link
Text	{{my.url-product-x}}	google.com/product-x
Text	{{my.url-product-y}}	google.com/product-y
Text	{{my.url-product-z}}	google.com/product-z

This will give us everything we need to create our emails.

UTM Structure

I followed this structure for utm values:

Medium

This value will always be =email

Campaign

This will match what the program is designed to do so in this case it is 2018-04-product-xyz

Source

This will refer to the specific email. You will see that the token value ends with a hyphen and that’s because I will append the number of the correspond email at the end. For example: if the email name is 010-product launch, then the token will be xyz-email-010. This is the only thing you will have to make unique for each one

Content

I have three different tokens for content: text-link, image, and button. This is helpful for measuring where on an email people are clicking.

Creating the Email

Since the products are tokenized and the utm tags are tokenized, adding them to an email is a breeze. Just paste these value to match the text of the product names.

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 is what your email will look like in HTML:

Inbox

This is what it will look like to your recipients:

URL

When you click the link you should see this… all the tokens placed the correct information in the correct place!