The question begins with:
“Can I track Google Analytics Style utm_ tags with Mixpanel?”
Yes you can, and this is great news. Mixpanel by default will do all the work for you, so kudos to this! We think however, that the next question you should be asking yourself is:
What if a customer comes to my site multiple times from different campaigns?
By default, mixpanel uses “first touch” attribution for the utm_ parameters. What this means is that your utm_ properties were stored as super properties, and will remain the same unless someone deletes the Mixpanel cookie for that domain/device.
Ever wondered why your site was receiving hits by so many visitors with a related old campaign months after?
This is because returning visitors of these previous campaigns are still sending the same utm_ properties (stored as super properties) to Mixpanel on broadcasts for each event.
Specifically, Mixpanel uses mixpanel.register_once(utm_params) to do this.
Here’s the work-around
When new utm_ parameters are found in your initial URL, this script “unregister”s all the related super properties, so you can correclty assing the new ones for the new campaign for every user, even returning ones:
Do you have another solution to this for first touch?
Or… Do you prefer last touch attribution?
Please leave your comments below!