If you have a boutique ecommerce shop, you probably use Instagram.
But if you look in Google Analytics, you’ll see close to no traffic from this supposedly wonderful handmade-marketing-engine. What’s going on?
Is it a failure? Or are your Instagram visitors just hidden?
When somebody taps the link in your profile and it opens your shop, Instagram doesn’t pass on any “referral” information to your shop. It doesn’t tell it that Instagram opened that link. As far as your shop is concerned, and therefore your Google Analytics tracking code and even Etsy Shop Stats (for Etsy sellers), that person may as well have opened up their mobile web browser and manually typed your shop address in.
In other words, Google Analytics and Shop Stats track that as a Direct visit.
And you have no idea which of all your Direct visits came from Instagram. You can guess by looking at which ones came from mobiles or tablets, but it’s not reliable.
This is where campaign (or UTM) tagging comes in.
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