[petercooper]

I run a newsletter company with almost 500k subscribers. When I started out 10 years ago, I was a fan of Google Analytics so added these parameters to all links in my newsletters. This was uncommon at the time and it turned out to have a huge impact on our growth as lots of webmasters were glued to their analytics at the time, wondered who we were, and Googled the name of our newsletters! I got emails or tweets every week saying as much and thanking us for linking to them, etc.

In the last five years it hasn't come up at all as everyone is doing it and people seem to dig through their analytics less than ever before, but if it helps you track links to your own content, as being shown in the article, it's certainly worth a go.

Another amusing point is that HN didn't used to strip these parameters, so sometimes I could see when people had reposted things from our newsletters on to HN (and kept the utm params in) which was always a buzz :-)

[duck]

Just to add to Peter's comment, the one issue with links via email/newsletters is that they show up as 'direct' traffic with no referral, so they are about impossible to link back to anything w/o the utm params.

[kirillzubovsky]

Yeah, "direct" traffic is so elusive. It's just a big bucket of visitors. It's a pity because I would have loved to reach out to folks who send this traffic and thank them, or ask for their thoughts on the product...etc.

Mailchimp adds their own trackers on top of the links you insert into the newsletter, which they use for tracking open/click rates, but that's almost less interesting than the source.

Why does it matter that I have a 36% click rate on the last issue, is it good? What if instead I have 10% click rate, but 1 of those people shared it with 10k more?

I understand why in general people don't like tracking, especially here on Hacker News, but I think some of it could lead to much better outcomes for all parties involved. I wonder what other solutions there are to help piece together your audience, and their interests.

[personjerry]

You can make a dummy page for each email link that simply redirects to the correct page with the proper tracking information.

[shostack]

Just about any email platform that does link tracking uses this approach and many can set custom UTMs for you automatically with those tracking redirects.

[duck]

I think that is exactly what Peter ended up doing for his newsletters.

[petercooper]

We have a redirect so we can measure traffic in aggregate (we don't track who clicks what) to refine our content over time. But.. I don't believe we get set as the referrer the way we do it (30x redirects). I believe this is why Twitter's t.co redirector DOES use a true "dummy page" as then they get the referral. It's something that might be worth trying though..

[duck]

Ah, okay... that makes sense and is a great setup. Did you run into any issues with spam filters when you made that switch?

[petercooper]

Nope, it's what Mailchimp, etc., do. All the outgoing links just fly through their server on the same hostname. We do the same with our hostname.

I have evidence that Google follows these links though, because if you link to a "bad" site even through a redirector, Google notices and will throw you into spam or say you're phishing, etc :-)

[stanislavb]

Thanks Peter, I'm wondering, why did you stop using UTM params?

[petercooper]

A handful of reasons all sorta collided.

First, we had some issues with certain sites not working at all if we added them and since our link forwarder was doing it automatically, it made life difficult. We came up with a way to turn them off on an adhoc basis but it was annoying.

Second, I didn't feel they were really moving the needle in any useful way. I don't think people are looking at their stats every day like they used to.

Third, it just felt like more litter/junk for tracking purposes. While there's no privacy aspect to it, I just felt like going a little cleaner in this regard. But.. I can't say they won't ever come back :-)