Real People Don’t Use UTM Codes
By: Felipe Hoffa
Tags: Social Media, Analytics, Developer Relations, Marketing, Bigquery

Real People Don’t Use UTM Codes

UTM codes are a great way to track the success of your online activities, but you shouldn’t use them. Avoid link shorteners too. Especially if your goal is to engage in authentic human-to-human conversations.

Caveat: If you are in a marketing organization driving marketing campaigns, you should totally use UTM codes. For example, this post from Lee Hurst begs marketers to start using more UTM codes.

So why shouldn’t you use UTM codes?

Human filtering

Every time we dive into social media (email, reddit, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, …) our brains drown in a sea of information overload. We are in this site to find interesting links, but our brains have had to develop quick strategies to separate real content from ads.

Which of these links would you rather click on?

The answer is clear: The first one looks like a link that a friend would send to me. The second one looks like a link I would find on an email campaign. The third one tells me nothing, and will probably remain un-clicked.

These 3 links go to the same place, but the first looks way more trust-worthy than the rest.

Machine learning filtering

A savvy internet expert will quickly counter: “People don’t need to see the links, you can hide URLs behind text”.

That’s true — and there will be people that click on a link without first snooping into what URL is hidden behind. But not all filtering is done by human brains. Computers try hard to filter authentic links from noise for you.

Take email, reddit, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook: They all try to surface links that are interesting to you, while filtering out spam. They all use machine learning to look at a link and score how interesting it might be to you. All of these ML models have been fed millions of annotated links, and all of these models have learned: If the link has an UTM code or if the link goes through an URL shortener, the probability of spam is much higher.

Let’s look at some data

For example, on reddit.com/r/programming during a given month 491 links had a score>5. Only one of these links had utm codes embedded:

/r/programming links don’t use utm codes (except 1 of 491)

Same on Hacker News: Looking at all the links with score>5 during 2020 so far, only a very small proportion of them have UTM codes embedded:

Hacker News links don’t use utm codes (except 49 of 36,170)

What about shorteners? 260 bitly URLs have been submitted to Hacker News this year, and their average score is 0:

Bitly links on Hacker News get an average score of 0

Queries

SELECT fhoffa.x.median(ARRAY_AGG(score)) median_score, url LIKE '%utm%' with_utm, COUNT(*) c

FROM `fh-bigquery.reddit_posts.2019_08`

WHERE score > 5

AND url>''

AND subreddit='programming'

GROUP BY 2; SELECT fhoffa.x.median(ARRAY_AGG(score)) median_score, url LIKE '%utm%' with_utm, COUNT(*) c

FROM `bigquery-public-data.hacker_news.full`

WHERE EXTRACT(YEAR FROM timestamp)=2020

AND score > 5

AND url>''

GROUP BY 2; SELECT ROUND(AVG(score)-1,1) avg_score, url LIKE '%bit.ly%' is_bitly, COUNT(*) c

FROM `bigquery-public-data.hacker_news.full`

WHERE EXTRACT(YEAR FROM timestamp)=2020

-- AND score > 5

AND url>''

GROUP BY 2

LIMIT 1000

UTM codes make it harder to re-share your content

Whenever I want to re-share an interesting link, I do so. But the link I got has UTM codes, now I have to work harder: Before sharing said link, I will need to clean it up, and remove al the UTM noise from it. Even more, if re-sharers don’t remove the existing UTMs, then all your analytics will become messed up with the wrong attribution.

If you want top social media influencers to naturally share your links, help them do so with minimum effort. They know their shares will be more successful without UTM codes, so help them by giving them clean links.

Shorteners are against the rules

On Medium, their rules:

To prevent fraud and abuse, you must, you may not: Include shortened URLs in your posts.

Medium rules agains shorteners. You may not “include shortened URLs in your posts”.

In fact, one of my friends was recently banned from Medium. The only flaggable behavior we found on their posts was the use of bitly links.

“Account suspended. Error 410. This account is under investigation or was found in violation of the Medium Rules”. If you use link shorteners on Medium, this might happen to you too.

This because URL shorteners are commonly used by spammers and abusers.

Quora seems to have similar policies (friends have had their content removed). And also people have strong negative reactions to UTM links. For example:

In summary

If you are driving marketing campaigns, use UTM codes.

If you are engaging in human-to-human conversations, don’t use UTM codes.

To avoid your links getting tagged as spam, don’t use URL shorteners or UTM tags.

To measure results without UTM codes… well, that’s for a future post.

Want more?

I’m Felipe Hoffa, a Developer Advocate for Google Cloud. Follow me on @felipehoffa, find my previous posts on medium.com/@hoffa, and all about BigQuery on reddit.com/r/bigquery.