UTM Parameters and Marketing Attribution

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Yeah, my investors were pissed too.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

In entrepreneurship or just failures in general?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

Module.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Go there later.

Yeah.

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. Oh, thank you. Good reminder.

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.

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