[cortesoft]

You can read some of the issues people have had with this by reading up on the http referer header: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_referer

There are a lot of reasons I might not want a site to know where I came from to get to their site. It is basically sharing your browsing history with the site you are visiting.

Because of this, there have been a lot of updates to the http referer header, with restrictions on when it is sent, and an ability to opt out of the feature entirely.

Adding a url parameter with the same information bypasses any of these existing rules and ability to opt out. They should just use the standard.

[odie5533]

If I send out an email campaign, I can't use custom http headers to know that a user arrived from the newsletter.

[cortesoft]

If you are sending out an email, you can use whatever url form you like?

This is talking about links to third party sites, not your own.

[abigail95]

use a unique url for each email

[zahlman]

As your reader, I might not actually want you to know.

[grg0]

Do you really need to? Basic statistics will tell you if the email campaign had any significant effect on site visits.

[maccard]

If I release a video and send an email newsletter at the same time, which one caused the traffic increase? Should I invest in making more videos of sending more emails?

[hananova]

If you insist on knowing, include a different url in both that goes to the same place and use your damn server logs. You don’t need google analytics and whatever.

[vel0city]

Isn't putting in a different query string "including a different url that goes to the same place"?

Isn't this functionally the exact same?

[zaphar]

presumably you control the urls you are sending in the email. As a result if you want to use query strings that's fine. The issue only arises when you use query strings to implement tracking on someone else's site instead.