Setting up Custom UTM codes for your Engagement

When analyzing the effectiveness of your various participant recruitment efforts, it is important to have clearly tracked data that helps you make future decisions on how to more successfully outreach to your residents.  While Engage's Source Tracking widget helps you to easily understand the data you've collected, and the Engagement Sharing Center automatically adds basic tracking codes to urls for you, there may be cases where you want additional or customized tracking codes associated with residents arriving from websites, campaigns, or offline sources. 

This article will help you to understand the format of 'UTM' codes that you can add to your engagement urls in order to add custom tracking.  One thing to note is that the format that Engage uses is identical to popular analytics software, such as Google Analytics, which helps ensure that the codes you add to support reporting in Engage, will also be useful in other platforms.

What are UTM Codes?

UTM codes are short pieces of code appended to the end of your URLs. They allow you to track specific sources and campaigns of participants in your engagements. The codes that Engagements support include:

• utm_source: Identifies the origin of your traffic (e.g., email, social media, search engine, paid advertising).  
• utm_medium: Specifies the marketing medium used (e.g., email, social, cpc, organic, referral).  
• utm_campaign: Designates the specific marketing or advertising campaign.  
• utm_term: Used for search campaigns to track specific keywords.  
• utm_content: Allows you to track different versions or variations of the same ad or content.  
• utm_id A flexible parameter that gives you the opportunity to track additional information, often assisting is cross-platform analytics  

Building Your Custom URLs

1. Start with your base URL: This is the URL of your engagement webpage (ie https://engage.zencity.io/city-name/engagements/98ss2890-9430-4e33-aabd-6f7458b6432d)

2. Add a question mark, follow by a list of UTM parameters in the following format:

   • Format: ?utm_source=[Source]&utm_medium=[Medium]&utm_campaign=[Campaign]&utm_term=[Term]&utm_content=[Content]

   • Example: https://engage.zencity.io/city-name/engagements/98ss2890-9430-4e33-aabd-6f2d&utm_source=Hubspot&utm_medium=qr&utm_campaign=Summer

3. Use this longer url when linking to the engagement from the relevant source.

A Reminder

Source tracking currently only applies to engagements, and following this article is only required if you need advanced tracking customization. Since the start of 2025, Engage is pre-wired to include some tracking codes for you so that your source tracking widget contain useful without any manual intervention.  For example:

• emails sent from Engage's 'Invite' tab will automatically append utm_medium=email to the url on the call to action button
• urls copied from Engage's Sharing Center also  automatically append a utm_medium code (ie utm_medium=qr when generating a QR coce
• content pages with CTAs to engagements will automatically append UTM codes (ie on a project page utm_source=Zencity&utm_medium=project_page)
• CTA and whole engagement embeds will automatically append UTM codes (ie utm_medium=embed)