What are UTM parameters?
UTM parameters are the text codes you can add to URLs (or links) of your website pages/landing pages to help you track the performance of a marketing campaign. You can use parameters like source, campaign, medium, etc., to identify which channels/campaigns/media drive your website's traffic.
What are source properties?
Source properties are contact fields in Freshmarketer that help you identify how your contacts came to visit your website or what the last campaign they interacted with was. Freshmarketer source tracking uses UTM parameters from your campaigns to enrich this contact data and track the contact source.
| Property | What it indicates |
| Original source/medium/campaign | The first known source through which a contact interacted with your business. |
| Created from source/medium/campaign | The source through which a contact was created in the account. |
| Most recent source/medium/campaign | The most recent known source through which a contact interacted with your business. |
How does Freshmarketer categorize the source properties?
Freshmarketer follows a set of rules to identify and enrich the source properties by checking the full page URL and the referring domain against these rules. They are applied in this order:
| Order | Condition | Medium | Source | Campaign |
| 1 | Facebook Form Integration and Campaign name is present. | utm_medium if parameter is present else Paid social | utm_source if parameter is present else <Social Media> eg: Facebook | utm_campaign if parameters is present else <Campaign Name from Lead Data> |
| 2 | If the URL contains utm_source or utm_medium or utm_campaign | <utm_medium> | <utm_source> | <utm_campaign> |
| 3 | If the referring domain is a social media site. | Organic Social | <Social Media Site Name> | - |
| 4 | If the referring domain is a search engine. | Organic Search | Google/Bing/Yahoo | - |
| 5 | If the referring domain is not a social media site or search engine. | Referral | <Referral Domain name> | - |
| 6 | No referring domain or UTM parameters in the URL. | Direct traffic | Direct | - |
Note: If the URL has revenue tracking parameters like fm_source, the recent source fields will not be updated with UTM parameters as it will conflict with the Freshmarketer campaign attribution.
Steps to enable source tracking in Freshmarketer
- To enable source/UTM tracking, go to Admin settings > CRM tracking code
- Ensure that the CRM tracking code is added to your website. If it is not, please add the code shown on the screen before the <head> tag of all the pages you want to track
- Enable the checkbox Track UTM source, medium, and campaign
You can now start tracking the source of your web traffic on Freshmarketer.
Contacts created via form tracking
Source properties are automatically set by Freshmarketer if the contact is created via Freshmarketer form tracking, but you can manually update the value on a contact record.
Contacts created via API
If you have added the CRM tracking code to your website, you can access the source details from the local storage of the browser, as shown below:
| Parameter | Location |
| Original source | window.localStorage._fm_os |
| Original campaign | window.localStorage._fm_oc |
| Original medium | window.localStorage._fm_om |
| Most recent source | window.localStorage._fm_rs |
| Most recent medium | window.localStorage._fm_rm |
| Most recent campaign | window.localStorage._fm_rc |
While creating contacts via API, you can pass any of the above values to the respective contact fields.
How to capture other URL parameters like Google/Facebook click identifiers?
You can also capture other parameters like GLCID, FBCLID, utm_term, etc. To track these parameters,
Enable ‘Track other URL query parameters’
- Create custom contact text fields with the same internal name as the parameter you want to track.
For example, If you want to track utm_term, create a custom field named utm_term. Make sure the internal name matches the parameter name. In this case, the internal name will be cf_utm_term.
Parameters supported:
utm_content (custom field internal name needed cf_utm_content)
utm_term (custom field internal name needed cf_utm_term)
utm_id (custom field internal name needed cf_utm_id)
Gclid (custom field internal name needed cf_gclid)
Fbclid (custom field internal name needed cf_utm_fbclid)
GA client ID from _ga cookie. If the cookie value is GA X.X.332167015.1681117847, 'GA X.X.' part will be removed, and only the rest (332167015.1681117847) will be stored in the field. The custom field internal name should be 'cf_ga_client_id'.
Using these, you can track the contact source on Freshmarketer to identify which channels/campaigns are bringing traffic to your store. You can also use source tracking on Freshmarketer to segment customers from different campaigns to personalize communication and retarget them with relevant offers.
If you face any issues in setting up source tracking for your website, please reach out to [email protected]