How do duplicate UTM parameters affect reporting in Google Analytics?

Question

I recently ran an e-mail campaign with a partner, who sent me over a URL with their own UTM parameters so they could track performance on their side.

When I handed the information over to our e-mail team and checked as the campaign went live, it appeared that they, out of habit, had added their own UTM parameters on top of the ones sent over by the partner, resulting in a click-through URL that looked like the following -

http://spirit.cruises.com/?cm_mmc=partner_email-_-sprt-multi_product--20161028--clia_plan_a_cruise_month&utm_medium=partner_email**&utm_source**=sprt-multi_product**&utm_campaign**=20161028&utm_content=clia_plan_a_cruise_month**&utm_source**=responsys**&utm_medium**=email**&utm_campaign**=20161028_50pct__Dual_Cruise_Email

As you can see, there are duplicate source, medium, and campaign parameters.

Does anyone know what happens in this situation? Does Google Analytics count both, or just the first, or just the last, or none? What is best practice when there are two parties that want to track performance of a URL in a campaign, and they may have different naming conventions?

(This is my first question, so please be nice :) Thanks!)

Answer 1

GA counts the last set. The proper way to deal with this is to avoid the situation. Email Software is often set to automatically add utm parameters to links (do you do not have to do it manually), but then all email marketing software I know would allow to override the configured default parameters.

I am not sure how your partner could track performance "on their site" via utm parameters unless they have their own GA code integrated in your website (or do you mean that they have access to your GA ?).

If there are two sets of analytics code that require different campaign attribution you would have use differently named parameters - let's say utm_medium2, utm_source2 and utm_campaign2 - and manually override campaign attribution for the second tracker:

// add this to after your usual tracker
ga('create', 'UA-XXXXX-Y', 'auto', 'partnerTracker');
ga('partnerTracker.set','campaignName',<value of utm_campaign2>)
ga('partnerTracker.set','campaignMedium',<value of utm_medium2>)
ga('partnerTracker.set','campaignSource',<value of utm_source2>)
ga('partnerTracker.send','pageview')

That would send data to a second account and override campaign attribution fields. It seems quite unlikely that you have or want that, but if you want to allow your partner to independently track utm values on your website (and everything else with it) that would the way to go.

Frankly I think you should just remove your partners utm parameters. Utm parameters make only sense for the owner of the respective GA account, and that is probably you, not the partner.

Answer 2

I agree with the first answer except for that last point where has says to remove the partner's UTM parameters.

In your case, the destination for the link provided to you by your partner is NOT your own website. The link goes to your partner's website. Therefore, your GA account has zero relationship with the link he sent you.

The way we're getting around this (without doing anything in analytics) for our many partners that we send links to is by using different email subjects per partner. Most email platforms use the subject line (or the internally defined Campaign "Name") as the value for UTM_Campaign.

So different subjects that include the partner organization in them: "Special discount for ABC Organization members!" "Special discount for XYZ Company members"

We can then analyze each unique campaign name in GA.