How Parse.ly tracks campaign data

Parse.ly automatically tracks five categories of campaign parameters: Campaign, Medium, Source, Content, and Term.

When a Parse.ly Tracker collects and sends URLs to the Parse.ly analytics server, we parse out parameters and their values by looking at query strings at the end of URLs. For instance, in the URL https://www.parse.ly/?utm_campaign=launch_promotion :

• The query string is ?utm_campaign=launch_promotion
• The parameter is utm_campaign
• The parameter’s value is launch_promotion

We show those parameters and their values in the Parse.ly dashboard. For example, you may click on Campaign (1) and then find synd_digg (2) in the list of campaigns.

Supported parameters

Parse.ly supports the following parameters and maps them to five categories.

In the case of the Campaign category, Parse.ly will run through the list of supported parameters in order. Once we detect a parameter, we collect it and don’t collect data on any of the other parameters. For instance, if we detect utm_campaign, we won’t run through the rest of the list.

If you use a parameter that’s not listed, please contact us. We’ll consider supporting new parameters as long as they can be mapped to one of the above categories.

Parsing Campaign parameters with multiple pieces of information

Some analytics tools advise including multiple pieces of information in the Campaign parameter, like this:

?cid=<campaign_name>-<source>-<medium>

Parse.ly will register this parameter as is, but we suggest splitting these pieces of information into separate parameters by using dynamic pageview tracking.

var params = PARSELY.$.param({
  utm_campaign: campaign,
  utm_medium: medium,
  utm_source: source});
if (url.indexOf("?") == -1) {
  params = "?" + params;
} else {
  params = "&" + params;
}
PARSELY.beacon.trackPageView({url: url + params});

Tracking campaign data for videos

To track campaign data about your videos, you don’t need to do anything beyond what you’re doing to track campaign data for your posts. A campaign, medium, source, content, or term “gets credit” for driving traffic to a video when a visitor watches a video on a web page with campaign parameters in its URL.

For instance, many visitors watch a video called “iPhone 7 Review” on https://cellreviews.com/iphone-7/, but some arrive at the page through a Twitter campaign, and others come from an email newsletter. Each URL is tagged with UTM parameters:

The number of visitors, video starts, and minutes watched for “iPhone 7 Review” are split up and attributed to whatever campaign, medium, source, content, or term appeared  in the URL.

You can see how marketing campaigns impact your video metrics by going to the Campaigns page and toggling from Posts to Videos.