UTM Parameters and Marketing Attribution

Hello everyone. Welcome to this episode of E Coffee with Experts. I’m your host, Matt Fraser, and on today’s show, I have with me Dan McGaw. Dan is an award-winning entrepreneur and speaker. He is also the founder and CEO of McGaw.io, a marketing technology and analytics agency, and the creator of UTM.io. He is named one of the godfathers of marketing technology stacks and one of the original growth hackers. Dan has decades of experience in digital marketing, technology, and analytics. He led the teams at Kissmetrics.com and CodeSchool.com, taking the latter company from $80,000 in monthly recurring revenue to $400,000 in monthly recurring revenue in just over a year. In 2015, he was selected to be a United States Ambassador of entrepreneurship by the United States Department of State. He had the privilege of advising government universities and private corporations on how to build entrepreneurial ecosystems. When he isn’t helping companies increase revenue and accelerate growth, he can be found doing laundry for his three children. Dan, thank you so much for being here. It’s a pleasure to have you on the show.

Thanks, Matt. Great to be here as well. I appreciate it.

Yeah, right on. So Dan, how would your high school teachers describe you as a student?

Wow. What a great question. That is the best question I’ve been asked in a podcast, I think, ever. What would my high school teachers describe me as? A badass would probably be the first one. Somebody who didn’t give a shit about class would be the second one. I was running my own company, and back then, being an entrepreneur was not a good thing.

Oh, interesting.

But they would also probably say unique and an enigma. I’m as good as I am bad in some cases. I was always known as the really, really smart kid who just wasn’t willing to apply myself because I was doing other things.

Were you bored with school?

Oh yeah, I was bored with school from fourth grade and on. The school was boring. I don’t like structure in that way where it’s like, sit down, and we have to teach you this thing. So, I don’t even have a high school diploma. Most people don’t know that. Did you know that?

Oh, no, I did not know that.

I have a Rainbow Diploma. I don’t consider it a diploma because it’s more like a GED. I didn’t walk down the aisle and get a commencement cap or anything like that.

Oh, wow. Well, you’ve done pretty well for yourself. We can edit this part if you want me.

No, it’s 100% me. This is what I tell people all the time. People always are like, Oh, you’re so smart, and I’m like, no, I’m not. I didn’t even graduate high school. Mark Zuckerberg at least waited till he got the college dropout. I dropped out of high school because I was doing business.

You know, it’s interesting like, for instance, if you compare who I was in high school, I was very similar. I wasn’t a badass, but I was bored of school as well, and I couldn’t focus. About four months ago, I was diagnosed with ADHD late in my life. I’m 46 right now, and it explains why I was bored in school and couldn’t focus. I felt like the teachers were teaching at a turtle’s pace, and my brain was operating rapidly. So, I wish they had done something different.

They are the weird ones, and we’re the good ones. The people who don’t have the racing thought like, come on, I’ll finish your sentence with no problem.

I have to be careful not to do that in public.

This is fascinating. If you didn’t graduate high school, then what inspired you to pursue a career in digital marketing? How did you get hired by Kissmetrics, or what was your first step?

Well, I started my first company when I was 13 years old. My good friend took me to a rave, and I went to the rave, and I was like, this is the best stuff ever. I fell in love with rave music. So, I got into techno music really early, and I was like, this is what I want to do. So, I fell in love with EDM, and then I tried to start a record label. Then I came to find out a record label is a bank, and I was too young, so I couldn’t start a bank at 13-14 years old. So, I turned that into a booking agency, and then I found out that a booking agency did phone calls or had connections, and I couldn’t do that. So, I built online bulletin boards and forms and tried to get that way through which my artists would get represented, and that was the original social media right back in 98-99 it was bulletin boards and forums. So, that’s how I got into digital marketing. Back then, it wasn’t really digital marketing, but I was doing mass email since before, there was mass email. That’s one of my things. But to fast forward nearly 15 years later to Kissmetrics, and how did I wind up at Kissmetrics? The way that I wound up at Kissmetrics is amazing. I fired Kissmetrics as my vendor, and I hit it off with the team at Kissmetrics when I was ending our contract. I was canceling our account. I was the VP of Growth at Code School, and I met Rossy Kong and Nimmo Chu during that process. They are some of the nicest guys I’ve ever met and some great people to work with. And during that process, they started to recruit me, and they spent the next nine months recruiting me for various positions until I turned them down. I kept saying no, and then finally, they gave me everything I wanted. I took Neil Patel’s job at Kissmetrics. I was mind blown, but that is how it worked out. And that’s how I want to be Kissmetrics as I ended our contract with them as our analytics vendor at another company.

That’s fantastic. Now, did Neil retire, or did he move on?

Yeah, he moved on. He kept his VP title. But on my first day, Neil was like, Hey, you’re in, I’m out. Here’s the board deck. Good luck, I’ll be around for another 30 days, and then he went and did what Neil does, which is make money and every other way possible. I mean, he’s a born hustler. He doesn’t run his companies. He has other people who run his companies. And that’s what I was, I was brought in to get him out, and I was very successful in that. So, he took off.

Wow. That’s amazing. What an amazing story. How did your experiences at Kissmetrics help you develop as a digital marketer and entrepreneur?

You know, I think the biggest thing that I took away was one, at Kissmetrics, I learned a lot about team management and team leadership. It was the largest team that I had run and a marketing team to that point. So, I went from running a team of basically four or five marketers to then running a team of ten marketers. I learned a lot about that and team management. But one of the things that I learned about digital marketing, which I think a lot of people don’t, which I was already good at but really leaned in on, is that digital marketing has a lot to do with management and project management. And I became extremely effective at project managing digital marketing there and realized my process of doing it was very effective. So, a lot of people don’t have rhythm in regards to their planning, and I’m a very monthly quarterly planning kind of a person, so I got very organized there. But in regards to digital marketing, like if I had to select the thing from digital marketing that I really learned, I got good at content marketing there. I learned the content game. I mean, when you have Neil Patel as your mentor for content marketing, and when you’re like, What the hell do I do? And Neil is like, this is the playbook. Shut up and take it. You learn it pretty quickly, and I’m super grateful for that. Sean Work, who is our head of content. He taught me a lot about content marketing. So, yeah, I learned a lot of stuff about that. I made a lot of mistakes, which was great, but I would say content marketing is what I really took away from there.

So would you say that one of the weaknesses of people executing digital marketing is not having SOPs structured execution path for getting things done? Will that be correct?

I don’t know if I would say standard operating procedures because I think a lot of stuff in marketing is still very creative. So, I don’t necessarily know of SOP. Like how do you launch a Facebook Ad? But I think time management and project management and making sure that you give yourself a limited period of time to be able to accomplish the task and as well as managing that across a wide variety of channels or tactics. I don’t think people do a good enough job at managing that. They kind of let it manage them, and then they don’t focus. They are like, okay, if I don’t get a good result by this date at this time. I’m going to move on to do this next. That’s what I mean.

Absolutely. Hey, so what eventually was the turning point for you leaving Kissmetrics and in your journey of starting your own analytics growth agency? Which used to be called Effin Amazing.

Yeah. That name was so much better. So, they’re not necessarily mutually connected. I left Kissmetrics because I was frustrated with the product. I had come to Kissmetrics because I had ended our relationship because the product sucked. We were moving from Kissmetrics and moving to Mixpanel, and that was because of the way that Kissmetrics stored data, which they’ve done a great job over the last eight years, to finally make it not store data in that way, but when I was headed to Kissmetrics, the data structure was really bad. And then there were a lot of fundamental problems with the product. Then if you were an advanced marketer like I was, you would get to a certain place where you’re reporting on your attribution and reporting on things and feel that’s the truth. And then suddenly you would notice it was not true, it was not correct, and then it was like this hidden bug that nobody would ever tell you. I was not okay with it. So, I ended up going there and then saying, hey, listen, we’ve got to fix this, and this is part of the reasons why I’m willing to do this. But unfortunately, a year after that, those things weren’t fixed. So, I started being rude about a bunch of things, and it was like, I want to go out. So, I got myself out of the company, and then I ran another venture-backed startup at the same time as working at Kissmetrics. I was running a funded startup when I left Kissmetrics, my investors gave me more money to focus on that full-time. I did that, but I didn’t make enough money to eat more than ramen. I was married, had two kids, and was about to have my third. My wife said you need to make more money for Christmas. What are you going to do? I was like, I don’t know, consulting, and I’ll do that 10 hours a week. That was November 2014, and in December 2014, though, I had a $25,000 a month client come to me, and I was like, well, maybe I should do this as a real business. So, in January 2015, we decided to start a company. We didn’t even have a company name until March 2015. It was just a fluke. I never meant to start this company. It was 100% an accident. So much so that I have never once named this company. The first name somebody else jokingly said, and I was like, that’s perfect. Then for McGaw.io, I fought the team for a year by calling it McGaw, and the team finally won. And the only thing on the name is dot io because I’m too poor to be able to afford dot com because it’s $425,000 for my last name dot com. So, I’ve never named this company. It’s super random. The only thing I chose was the tech stack.

Wow. So, your entire agency came in as a result of a consulting gig and doing part-time while running a business full-time.

Yeah, my investors were pissed too.

Oh, wow. Yeah, that’s pretty amazing.

But you’ve always been a hustler. It sounds like it’s. When I first saw your company, when it came into my preview, I thought that’s so brilliant. And the way you spelled it and everything. I thought it was very smart, but obviously, you changed the name. How has the company been received since the name change, and why was the name changed? Was it that the market just found it too offensive?

The market definitely found it too offensive. There have been multiple times we have partners that we work with big companies who, like, had issues with the name when introducing us to clients. So, it’s always a concern, and it took us five years to change the name. So, to make the decision, we should change it. And then, it took us a year to figure out a new name, but we changed it in May 2020 to McGaw. That’s our LLC. The domain is dot IO, so everybody knows this MacGaw.io. But yeah, there was definitely a little bit of pushback, but all of our customers who worked with us loved it. All of our customers who worked with us saw it. At the end of the day, if you’re a customer who works with me and you experience my energy, which I’m pretty chill right now. Sorry, it’s been a long day. But people, when you’re around my energy and as well as my profanity, I’m going to swear whether you like it or not. It really worked for us. So, we still own the domain. If you go to effinamazing.com, it forwards to us. I will never drop that domain. I will launch another company one day called Effin Amazing. I don’t know what it will be yet. But first, I’m going to go get my bagel shop off the ground, and then I’ll come back to Effin Amazing. So, the bagel shop is next.

Amazing bagels or Effin Amazing bagels.

I own bagelbar.com. I bought that for four grand. The Bagel Bars are a concept, and I’m not going to tell anybody anything more than that.

No, don’t. That’s cool. Hey, how did you feel when you were notified of your appointment as the federal ambassador of entrepreneurship by the U.S. government? I mean, that’s pretty cool, man.

It was a smack in my face. I was like, what?

Especially since you’ve revealed that you didn’t finish high school, and I don’t know if I said this, but I might as well not have graduated either. But anyway, could you expand on that? How did it feel? It must have been pretty amazing.

I was blown away. I had no idea. So, it was definitely really interesting and really cool, and it was a lot of fun. You know, I think most people don’t understand this, but Mexico is more entrepreneur than America because Mexico is a very small business. They don’t have the technology or large corporations in the same manner that we do everywhere. So, everybody either owns a taco shop or owns a mechanic garage, or owns a lot of different things. There are a lot of really, really small local entrepreneurs, and they struggle to do anything more, anything bigger, because they don’t want to fail. Failure is a huge problem in their culture, and that was something that I was able to come to speak about because I’ve failed a lot. Luckily, I’m not embarrassed by it, but they don’t have access to technology as we do. They don’t have access to the same innovation that we do. And then the mindset is like, hey, listen; I’m going to take over my pop’s taco shop. There’s nothing wrong with that. But they’re trying to stir more innovation. So, I was really surprised when I got the invite to come down and speak in Tijuana, Mexico. It was really cool.

That’s amazing. What are your thoughts on the role of entrepreneurship in the United States economy?

I think it’s a humongous part. I think it’s something that has been stifled by corporations, unfortunately. But I think entrepreneurship is a huge part of any economy. Entrepreneurship is where innovation comes from. It’s where jobs come from. So, I think it’s a huge part. But I also think that entrepreneurship sucks. I mean, there’s no easy way to say that. I mean, being an entrepreneur is really hard. I don’t think it’s something everybody wants to go into.

No. I mean, we need people who are leaders and people who are followers. Not everybody can be a leader in force and have the fortitude and all that it takes to be an entrepreneur. It’s interesting Robert Kawasaki was saying we need more entrepreneurs and more business leaders at the recent Patrick McDavid conference for Value Tenement, and I kind of agree with him, but you are right? It is hard. I’ve failed so many times. I only want to talk about it right now, but maybe some other day. But what do you think is the most important thing for entrepreneurs to know then? Like, what words of encouragement would you give to some agency owners who are just finding the grind really tough?

Don’t quit. That’s the only thing entrepreneurs need to focus on is don’t quit. There’s a famous quote in the book by Ben Horowitz, Hard Thing About Hard Things. The entrepreneur that comes in and talks about how it was their winning strategy, which got them there, is the one that they don’t fund, but the one that comes in and they’re like, what got you here? And they’re like, I just didn’t quit. Those are the entrepreneurs that ultimately are the ones that they fund at age 16. And that’s true. At the end of the day, everybody wants to say you’re an overnight success. But Mark Zuckerberg worked on Facebook for close to ten years before it was mainstream. Amazon’s been around for over 20 years before most Americans knew what it was. Starbucks was around for almost 30 years before it became massive. It takes a long time to do this. So, at the end of the day, it’s really not until year five that you start to get compounding interest, as it’s called. There’s a great book called The Compound Effect, and it’s really not until year five that usually hit that kind of entrepreneur compounding effect, and then year ten is usually when most entrepreneurs really get the compounding effect because you learn from most of your mistakes. I think it’s kind of like the mentality of it takes 10000 hours to be an expert at something. Well, every year, you’re putting 10000 hours into one part of the business where you become an expert, but it takes you ten years, so 100000 hours, to finally understand how to grow that thing. Don’t get me wrong, not everybody does, and there’s always going to be flukes or people who are rocket ships and things like that. Right place, right time, and business owners who have done it before. Like if you look at Drift. They’ve canceled. This isn’t his first rodeo. So, you gotta keep working hard.

Yeah. There’s a book by John Maxwell called Failing Forward and where he talks about you just fail forward. Don’t look at failure as a bad thing. But look at it as something you continuously learn from and move forward on, and that’s based on what I’ve just heard you say. Would you agree with that sentiment?

I fail all the time. I put my neck down in places that I probably shouldn’t have. My head’s been cut off more than once.

That’s very interesting. Would you be willing to share one of the failures you experienced and what lesson you learned from it?

In entrepreneurship or just failures in general?

In entrepreneurship.

So, I owned a mobile app company, and one of the things that happens when you take on money from investors is you listen to them. And this is a mistake that I made as an immature entrepreneur and a green entrepreneur. I listen to their advice a little too much. And one of the things that I was very confident about is we had a mobile geolocation app that helps you find gas stations and deals at gas stations. So, for us to be able to build propensity, we needed to build density in a city, in a region. So, like in Orlando, where I live, I was like, we need to focus all of our effort on businesses here in Orlando, and my investors were like, no, you got to go nationwide, you got to go big, you got to like do all these things. So, either way, I listened to my investor, and we wound up being one of the number one reasons why we went out of business. We could not build any propensity in any one region. So, we couldn’t get enough users in a location to keep our gas prices up to date and have enough deals. We tried to run some nationwide deals, but because of that, we ran out of cash, and I had to sell the company to my co-founder, and the company went out of business. We failed because we should have focused on local compared to trying to be national. So that’s like one of the failures in life. But I mean, they’ve all failed. So, the only one that hasn’t failed yet is McGaw, and all the others are gone. Isn’t that the definition of failure? The company’s gone.

Maybe or maybe you have life lessons from it.

Yes, that’s the thing. That’s why I don’t like the concept of failure because it’s a life lesson. It gives us a great learning experience.

What about UTM.io, though? Isn’t that still going?

Yeah. UTM.io is doing great. We just hired another full-time person last week. We’re about to hire another one next week. UTM is doing great. I’m super excited about that one.

Yeah, that’s phenomenal. What was your inspiration for launching that platform?

At Effin Amazing, we had a problem with our clients never making the correct UTM codes for their campaigns. So, we built a free chrome extension, and that free Chrome extension, we put it out in the wild, and next thing I know, we had 10,000 users over a two-year period, and it was bringing in hundreds of leads a month. Then one of my employees owned UTM.io, and I was like, listen, I’ll make you my co-founder, and I’ll buy the domain from you, and you can help me grow it. So, Hussein, who’s still a part of the cap table, is my co-founder in that company. He’s no longer in the company, but we turned it into UTM.io, and now we have Shopify as a customer, Zapier as a customer, Robert half technology, and Henkel’s knives. These big companies are our customers, which I’m super grateful for, and all the luck that we’ve had over there. So, it’s been cool.

Yeah, well, it’s an amazing platform. I became a customer a long time ago. I’ve even interacted with your team, and I’ve been in a one-on-one session with some of your team members, helping me to configure things, and it’s been a lot of fun. I would recommend every single agency owner to go sign up for UTM.io right now because you need to use it for your clients for attribution. I know your time is limited, and I really want to appreciate you coming on today. It’s been an absolute blast. There are so many other things I wanted to talk to you about regarding UTMs and best practices. I see so many big companies, Dan, doing UTM wrong. Now, what do I mean by wrong? What I mean by wrong is the way that I have learned from you through your blog posts, your tutorials, and the things that you teach. For instance, they’re using campaign sources instead of using the name of the platform, like Salesforce, they’ll use a newsletter, or they’ll use something that’s not relevant. Maybe they’re forcing the latter case in analytics with a filter, but they’ll use uppercase and lowercase instead of all lowercase regarding the parameters. Do you think that we’ll ever get to a point like, why is that though? Why is it that people, I think, should be sophisticated marketers making really stupid, simplistic mistakes?

I know the reason, and just so you know, I can run over 10 minutes, so I have until the hour. The number one reason why you see those mistakes, especially when you see those big companies, is because the big company is big, but the people that work inside of them are typically pretty inexperienced or green when it comes down to making these campaign codes. And at the end of the day, the campaign codes are not always that easy. I mean, there’s what Google advises you to do. Like you have your set mediums, you have your set sources, and things like that. But understanding that taxonomy or schema is not always something that we learn in school. It’s not something you learn in college. It’s something you have to learn by doing research. It’s not something that they teach you in a textbook. So, a lot of people just don’t understand the formality of it. And that was the whole reason why we ended up building UTM.io and why it’s been pretty successful is because people are always searching; what is a UTM? People are always searching for UTM builders, and in our product, one of the things that we try to do is make it so that we have a rules engine in our paid plan. So, you talk about Shopify as an example, one of our big users. They’ve got 100 different users in the account, and they can control what rules are set up. So, what users select, there’s a grouping session. It’s not something that’s taught in school. I’ll do a fun pop quiz. Can you tell me what UTM stands for?

Urchin Tracking. I can’t remember anything.

Module.

Yes. Urchin tracking module.

Bonus points in your quiz because you just aced your quiz. What’s urchin?

Well, it was the company that used to be Google Analytics. They started Google Analytics.

I like it. Good job. You know what it is. You crush it. Almost nobody knows the answer. So, you know, you’re an OG if you know what Urchin and UTM stand for. Urchin is the thing in the sea that sticks out and touches everything. And that’s what Urchin did. It tracked all the little things out there.

Yeah, well, I started using it because I was at the car dealership, and the sales manager was trying to get me fired because he didn’t think I knew what I was doing. And I actually got one of them fired indirectly because I revealed that he was not doing his job. I won’t go into the details of it because it wouldn’t be professional. But I had to learn attribution and your platform, your articles, and all those things, to be quite frank with you, helped me a lot about Facebook ads. I took this dealership not to toot too much, but like from the second worst dealership in western Kansas, number one. And I had to learn because I remember when the general sales manager pulled me into his office and told me what you’re doing wasn’t working. I said, well, how do you know? He said, well, because they’re not selling any cars. And I quickly learned right then and there that a marketing person could do their job 100% and sales can’t not do their jobs. And so I knew from looking at the CRM there was an industry dealer-specific CRM that they weren’t following up with the leads. So, I quickly started to implement UTM parameters on all my campaigns, including Google Analytics, and using your tutorials, Facebook ads, and everything that I was doing, everything in implemented call tracking and implemented proper KPIs. I could go into it and talk about it for an hour, but I won’t. But anyway, the only point I’m trying to make is that I learned from it, and that’s why I invested in UTM for what I was doing at the time. Your materials helped me a lot. So, I’m very grateful for that. Thanks to you, I could show and prove that what I was doing was working.

So that being said. What are some common UTM link-building mistakes to avoid for better attribution? For instance, I mentioned to two of my guests that people use the wrong letter case, use the wrong source parameters, and mix those things up in regards to putting email in the source or in a medium. Are there any other common things you see people doing that screw up their attribution?

I mean, I think the biggest thing that we see is people don’t understand the difference. I mean, you name your name like the most popular ones that we’re talking about. So, that’s a big thing. I think the next biggest thing that we typically see people do is there’s a concept known as hybrid tagging. One of the problems is when you’re using Google ads. They have their automated tagging, aka, Google ads auto-tagging. Auto-tagging only works with Google Analytics. It does not work with any other platform. So, people tend to forget. They’re like, I just turn on Google ad tagging. I don’t need anything else. But the problem is that if you really want to get your campaign information into other tools, so whether it be analytics tools, marketing, automation, or whatever it be, you need to use hybrid tagging. So, turn on Google auto-tagging, but also add your tracking template on top of that because you’re still going to want to make sure that if you have Marketo or HubSpot or MailChimp and you’re using a hidden field to store those variables, you still want to know what keyword you so want to know all that thing. So, I think that the next biggest one that we see is not using hybrid tagging. If you’re just Google-like auto-tagging versus UTM tagging, we should be like the 1st result, but hybrid tagging is definitely the route that you want to go.

Yeah, and I learned that from you, and I went that route when I was at the dealership regarding tagging and using hybrid tagging. And I went so far. I don’t know if this is right or not because nobody told me there. So maybe you can help me, even though it may not matter because of GA4. But I went so far as to create a separate Google ads view. So, I created a view based on, I can’t remember his name, but he owns Optimized Smart dot com, and he talked about how you should have a different view for every channel or medium, whatever, like one for Facebook ads, one for a target market view. So, I set up a target market, but I had a specific view of Google ads because some of the goals that I was tracking were only specific to Google ads. So, I wanted the Google Ads campaign and the Google Analytics view for that specific Google ads to be talking to one another only for those things. And I set up hybrid tagging and to this day, no one has told me. Matt, what you did was right.

Matt, what you did was right. I’m on your side on that one.

There you go. Okay, good. I did the right thing. So, that’s interesting about marketing, you can learn from other people, but sometimes you just have to use your brain and think. Would you agree?

I would agree. A lot of marketing is simply common sense. It’s not rocket science. And the thing that I’ve learned most, I think, in marketing over the years is that, like, I used to be kitschy, I used to try to be cool and creative, and really, it’s like just be dumb and simple. There’s a great book out there called Words That Work. It’s an amazing book that’s written by a Republican strategist about what words work. And at the end of the day, people like short sentences without commas. That’s what we understand. That’s what marketing is. Short sentences.

Do you think that UTM parameters can be used for offline tracking? Now I’ll give you, for instance. I’ll just say, like a billboard, someone uses a vanity or a domain name to forward that domain name to the UTM parameters.

Absolutely. njminsurance.com. It’s one of our clients. So, I was like, all of your billboards should have vanity matrix and NJMloves.com and NJMinsurance.com and NJMauto.com as I can just put parameters on it, like put a redirect on it. If you go to anybody listening, if you look up stackcourse.io or stackbuilder.com, all of these are just vanity metrics that we have. Some of them load up different parameters, and some of them don’t load up anything. I own a few hundred domains because many of them are just vanity domains. Stack builder was one of my favorite ones to buy. I think I paid $4500 for that. If you go to stackbuilder.com, it will take you to our stack builder, which is down today. By the way, there’s a bug that I have not told the developers about, so don’t go today.

Okay? All right.

Go there later.

I’ll go there later. By the time this goes live, it will be fixed.

Yeah.

Right on. That’s so awesome. These are some of the questions I want to ask, so here’s the interesting thing. For instance, when using a CRM and tracking like I use marketing automation software, as do you. And when I was sending the email, the boss thought that the email was just typing something up in Gmail and sending it out. But can you share an example of how you’d use your time tracking in the CRM? For instance, should you use different parameters in the content for the different links, like a body link or a footer link, or let’s say there are two links in the body? Link one, link two, or are there any other naming conventions that are best practices that you’ve used over the years?

Yeah. So, the way that I think about it is the term is the keyword or the language that’s being used. And then, the content is the visual description or placement of the item. And at the end of the day, like, the thing I always try to tell people is you just need to come up with what your organization thinks. Like, what I say doesn’t really matter at the end of the day. Like, if I’m running an email campaign and that email campaign has six links that go to the same place, I would have linked one at the top would be like the top body, and the one at the bottom of the body would be like the lower body, or you could have one, two, three, four, five, six. But at the same time, one of the things I’ve learned going back is to keep it simple. That doesn’t really matter unless you’re running a big campaign. So, if you have a footer, like a footer logo, header logo or whatever, like what are you going to learn or what are you going to do? And that’s where I think I push back a lot. And being in analytics for so long now, coming from Kissmetrics. I literally run an analytics consulting firm. The question is, can we no longer track it, and do we need to do this? The question is, what the hell am I going to do with it? Now that I have the answer, why does it matter? And I have so many people that I work with, and I love all of my clients. My clients sometimes would be like, I want to track this or I want to track that, but what are you going to do with it? Well, because we need to know in the case of this, and I’m like, but really, are you going to do anything now that you know that this was clicked in the header? What are you going to do? Like, well, I know they click on the header, and I am like, cool people always click on it. What are you going to do next? And they go, well, I could increase the header size. And then I am like, really? That’s what your idea is, buddy. So, only focus on tracking it if you can make an outcome. So, go to your point. If you’re Macy’s and you’re running a 600 variant dynamic email. Yes, use UTMs all over the place. But most people aren’t that sophisticated. And by the way, Macy’s is usually not sophisticated, either. They’re pretty simple.

Yeah. So, I guess it depends on the context and the outcome. That’s pretty amazing. Hey, I want to respect your time. I know we’re coming to the top of the hour, and you have to go.

Yeah. Oh, thank you. Good reminder.

How can listeners connect with you online if they want to do so?

The easiest way to do it is to go to LinkedIn and type in Dan McGaw, and you’ll find me there eventually. I’m the one that usually comes up, usually. So, that’s the easiest way, or go to McGaw.io. There is no R in my name. M.C.G.A.W.

Yeah. Hey, Dan. Thank you so much for coming to the show today. I really appreciate it. It’s been an absolute pleasure having you here.

You rock, buddy. Thanks so much. I’ll talk to you in a minute.

Thanks a lot. Yeah, totally.