UTM and Discount Configuration Guide

One value per event, formed as the event slug plus the year:

Decide this once when the event opens and put it in the event’s configuration notes. Every link for that event uses it unchanged, forever. This is what makes "how did the 2026 event perform overall" answerable.

A closed vocabulary. Adding new values erodes the ability to compare channels, so extend it deliberately, not casually.

Keep qr and print distinct. If both share one value you cannot tell whether people scan posters or type the URL, which is exactly the question that decides next season’s poster design.

The specific origin. This is the only field with an open vocabulary, and it should be as specific as you can usefully make it — spar-worcester, not supermarket.

Maintain a list of the sources issued per event, so that the same partner is spelled the same way in every campaign and you can reconcile the totals afterwards.

Optional. Use it when one source produces more than one link, to tell the variants apart:

Issue a separate source per venue, so that you learn which locations work:

Do not encode that full string into the QR code. A long URL produces a dense QR grid that scans poorly on a poster — at distance, at an angle, in direct sun. Instead:

This also means a printed poster can be retargeted later — change the redirect, not the print run.

Pair the attribution with a discount code, so the partner has something to offer:

Give each partner their own coupon code, even when the discount value is identical across partners. The coupon is recorded on the order itself, which makes it a far more durable attribution signal than the cookie — see Treat the coupon as the hard signal.

utm_source is the platform; utm_content is the individual post:

This lets you see which post worked without exploding the source list into dozens of one-off values.

Here utm_source names the audience segment — waitlist, past-entrants, wpca-members — because for a mailing list the segment is the meaningful distinction, not the platform. Use utm_content to separate the sends within one campaign.

Most mailing platforms can append UTM parameters automatically per send. Configure it there rather than hand-editing every link, so you never ship a half-tagged link — see Tagging is last-touch, and overwrites wholesale for why partial tagging is actively harmful.

The Tour de Worcester waitlist campaign uses a coupon configured as:

Paired with this link:

Note the effect of Limit usage to X items = 1: a parent entering two children on one order receives 10% off one entry only. That may well be intended — it is called out here because it is the setting most often configured by accident.

Capture runs on WordPress. A tagged link pointing straight at the registration portal captures nothing at all — no cookie is ever set, and the entry arrives unattributed. Always link to a page on the tenant’s public WordPress site and let the normal entry flow carry the visitor onward.

Any front-end page works, including the home page, so a link to / is functional. Linking to the event’s entry page is still better, simply because it saves the visitor a click.

The cookies are host-only. If the poster reads www.example.co.za and the pay page runs on example.co.za, the cookie set on the first host is never sent to the second, and the attribution and the discount are both lost.

Pick one canonical host, and verify that the other redirects to it. If a redirect exists it must happen before WordPress processes the request — a WordPress-level canonical redirect fires after capture has already written the cookie to the wrong host.

Each visit carrying any utm_* parameter replaces the entire stored set. A link carrying only utm_source therefore wipes the campaign and medium recorded by an earlier click.

Always emit the same field set on every link for a campaign. This is the main argument for configuring UTM parameters centrally in the mailing platform rather than assembling them by hand.

A visit carrying no utm_* parameters leaves the existing values untouched, so ordinary browsing between the click and the entry is harmless.

The cookies live for 72 hours from the click. A visitor who clicks the newsletter on Monday, thinks about it, and enters the following weekend arrives with neither attribution nor discount.

For a campaign where a longer consideration window is expected, the lifetime is adjustable through the epa_discount_cookie_ttl filter — a development change, not a setting in the WordPress admin. Raise it with the development team before the campaign, not after.

An entry that never reaches the WooCommerce pay-for-order page never gets its metadata written. Free entries and any flow that bypasses payment are not attributed.

A QR code scanned from within Facebook, Instagram or WhatsApp opens in that app’s embedded browser. If the visitor later reopens the link in Safari or Chrome to finish entering, the cookies do not travel with them.

Nothing in the URL can prevent this. It is the strongest practical reason to attach a discount code to any link that genuinely matters.

UTM values are a soft signal — they depend on a cookie surviving a multi-host round trip, a 72-hour window, and the visitor staying in one browser.

The coupon code is a hard signal. It is applied to the order itself and survives cookie loss, device switches and in-app browsers. When a number has to be defensible — a partner rebate, a revenue share, a per-club count — count coupon redemptions and use the UTM data only as supporting colour.