Using UTM with E-commerce
Overview
Since the key aspect of UTM is the ability to identify and correlate visitor activity, visitor activity that generates revenue can be tracked across your sites and reported on collectively. Transactions on the server that hosts your shopping cart software can be correlated with sessions on your other webserver, allowing session variables, such as referrals and keywords, to be reported on versus the revenue they generate. The UTM provides multi-session tracking that tracks the visitor from source to purchase or goal. Conversion ratios and ROI reports provide detailed results of on-line marketing efforts including keyword buying, e-mail campaigns, and link exchanges.
Same Domain Configuration
If the front-end website and secure e-commerce site use the same domain, installing the UTM on your e-commerce site is no different than installing on other types of websites. The information in the other areas of this section on UTM installation will provide the specifics of installation. Special attention should be paid to the areas explaining how to set the UTM domain appropriately for your e-commerce and other sites. Further information on e-commerce transaction log formats is provided in the E-commerce section of the documentation.
Cross Domain Configuration
It is increasingly common for web sites with e-commerce shopping carts to outsource the e-commerce component to another organization such as Amazon, PayPal, or Yahoo Stores. This can create a problem for the UTM tracking as the domain for UTM changes as a visitor goes from the main website to the secure store. In order for the secure store to use the same UTM visitor ID as the main website, the visitor ID must be passed in the link to the secure store. The UTM contains a utmLinker function that will wrap the link with the appropriate id before sending the link to the store. Instead of linking directly to the store, simply pass the link to the utmLinker function. Here are the specific instructions for using the utmLinker:
- Edit the urchin.js file in the document root of both web sites; set the _ulink variable to 1 and the _udn variable to "none"
- Set the UTM Domain for the profile to nothing (blank).
- Change the links from the main site to the secure site as shown here:
<a
href='javascript:__utmLinker("https://previous_link?with_parameters");'>
link-to-shopping-cart</a>