UTM Tracking: Tag Your Links and Read the Report

UTM Tracking shows which of your links, ads and campaigns bring seekers to your ministry, and how their conversations ended. It only has numbers if the conversations arrive with a campaign tag, and Echo cannot add one itself. This guide covers how to tag each kind of link, including Messenger and Meta ads, and then how to read the report. If the report is empty, start with If it did not work.

Which channels record tags

Tag your website links

1. Pick the web page where the seeker will start a chat or fill in a form. It must have your Echo chat widget or form on it. See Chat Website Integration if it does not yet.

2. Add a question mark to the end of that page's address, then your tags, joined with &. Use the tags in the table below.

3. Use that full address in your ad, email or social post.

4. Open the link yourself and check that the tags are still in the address bar when the page loads.

https://yourministry.org/talk?utm_campaign=easter-outreach&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email

Tag a web form

Forms that send contacts into Echo record the same tags, but they do not read them from the address. Your form has to send them. Add a field for each tag you want to keep, name it exactly as in the table above, and fill it with the value from the link.

• Web Contacts API: include utm_campaign, utm_source, utm_medium, utm_content, utm_term and utm_outreach in your request. It also accepts outreach_code, which Echo records as the outreach tag when no utm_outreach is sent. See Echo Web Contacts Integration.

• Wufoo: add a field to the form whose title starts with utm_, such as utm_source, and make sure it is filled with the value from the link. See Echo Wufoo Integration.

• Gravity Forms and Google Forms: send the tag names above with the form, as set out in Gravity Forms Integration and Google Forms Integration.

Tag Facebook Messenger

Messenger has no page address for Echo to read, so the tags travel in a ref: a short piece of text that Facebook passes to Echo when someone opens Messenger from your link or ad. Echo needs your Facebook Page connected first. See Facebook Integration.

There are two places to put a ref, and they are written differently.

Meta only allows letters, numbers, dashes, underscores and equals signs in an ad's ref, which is why the ad format has no colon or vertical bar. Echo tells the two formats apart by the colon: a ref with a colon in it is read as the first format, and one without is read as the second. Do not mix them in one ref. Use two underscores between tags, not one, because some values contain a single underscore.

Echo recognizes campaign, source, medium, content, term and outreach. A tag written any other way is skipped.

Add a ref to a Messenger link

1. Start with your Page's Messenger link, https://m.me/ followed by your Page's username or ID.

2. Add ?ref= and then your tags in the first format.

3. Give each campaign its own campaign value, and change source or medium where it helps you tell links apart, such as post or print.

https://m.me/yourpagename?ref=campaign:hopeforyou|source:facebook|medium:post

This works for a person starting a new conversation, or continuing one.

Add a ref to a Messenger ad

For an ad that opens a Messenger chat, the ref is part of the ad, not of a link. The steps below follow Meta's Ads Manager as we know it, and Meta changes its screens, so look for the ad's message template, the greeting and questions people see when the chat opens.

1. In Ads Manager, open the ad and edit its message template.

2. Set the ref parameter in the second format, for example campaign=hopeandfaith__source=facebook__medium=ad. Use a different campaign value for each campaign you want to tell apart.

3. Publish the change. The ref only travels with conversations that start after you publish.

A new conversation that starts from a Messenger ad now brings the ad's campaign into Echo. An ad with no ref sends nothing a campaign can be read from. Meta also does not always send an ad's details with every conversation the ad starts, so some will still arrive as a plain first message.

Add a place to the same ref

The same ref can also carry city, state (or region), country and zip. Echo writes these onto the seeker's record. On the conversation it saves city, region and country. Echo also keeps the ref exactly as it arrived.

What Messenger does not record yet

• Instagram conversations do not carry campaign tags, including ones that start from an Instagram ad.

• A repeat seeker, someone whose earlier conversation already has tags and who starts a new one, is not tagged by the new ref yet.

Tag email conversations

Email conversations do not carry campaign tags. The one thing Echo records is the outreach tag, and only for email that arrives on a SendGrid email domain. There, Echo saves the part of the address the email was sent to, before the @ sign. If you send different campaigns to different addresses, such as easter@ and prayer@, the conversations are grouped by address. Email on other providers records no tag. See Email Domains for which provider your domain uses.

What the tags mean

How Echo keeps the tags

• Each conversation keeps one set of tags. For web contacts and email, a tag that is already saved is not replaced by a later one, and a blank tag does not erase one.

• For Messenger, Echo attaches the tags to the seeker's most recent conversation on that Page if it has none yet. If the ref arrives before the conversation exists, Echo holds it and attaches it when the seeker's first message arrives.

Where else the tags show

• The conversation filters can narrow by campaign, source, medium, outreach and term. See Echo Filters.

• The GraphQL API returns the tags on each conversation.

If it did not work

Reading the report

Running the report

1. Open Reports from the main menu. In the left-hand menu, under Reports, click UTM Tracking.

2. Click the date range at the top of the page and choose your dates. The globe menu beside it sets the time zone, which starts on your ministry's own.

3. Click Sources and choose the conversation sources to include. The number beside it shows how many are chosen.

4. Optional: click Permission Sets to count only conversations that someone in those sets claimed. Leave it empty to include everyone.

5. Use the switch to choose Created At or Closed At. Created At places a conversation on the day it started. Closed At places it on the day it closed, so conversations that are still open are not counted.

6. Click Run Report on each card you want to see. A card does not load until you do, and the button stays gray until you change a filter.

Ads Overview

Five small pie charts side by side: Source, Campaign, Medium, Content and Term. Under each is a list of the values seen and how many conversations carried each. Values are shown in capitals, so Newsletter and newsletter count together, and conversations with that tag left blank are left out of that chart.

Campaigns

A table with one row for each different combination of source, campaign, medium, content and term, and the Total number of conversations that arrived through it. Only conversations that have a campaign tag appear here.

Outcomes by UTM

The same links, with how their conversations ended. Each row starts with Campaign, Source, Medium, Content, Outreach and Term. After those comes one column for each outcome your ministry uses, and a last column, Not Dispositioned. Use the search box to find a campaign.

What the measurements mean

Things to know

• Outcomes by UTM counts only conversations that have a disposition, so it can show fewer conversations than the Campaigns table.

• Two links that differ only in capital letters are the same row in Campaigns. Keep your tags consistent anyway: news-letter and newsletter are different.

• The Created At and Closed At switch decides which date puts a conversation in the period.

Most cards also carry two small icons beside the title. The star pins the card to your Dashboard. The download icon saves the card as a CSV file, or as XLSX if your download preference is set to XLSX.