Query string parameters

Query string parameters are very important for web tracking. One of the most used parameters are the so called “utm-parameters”. These parameters provide information about the marketing campaign a user originated from.

For more information about campaign tracking, read our campaign tracking documentation.

It is also possible to define a parameter for custom meta data. This way, you do not only have to rely on the datalayer for obtaining a value, but you can also use the query string parameters.

For example, let’s say you have defined the following:

Variable name: hashedCustomerID Parameter: h_cid Variable group: userData Variable type: dimension

We want to use the hashedCustomerID to stitch users across multiple devices. When a user receives an email, we add this variable to the landing page url, so Harvest Collect can pick up the variable.

Example landing page: https://harvest.graindata.com?h_cid=123ad123sdfsj123413

When an event is tracked on this page, Harvest Collect detects that we need to check for a parameter h_cid. This parameter is found with the value “123ad123sdfsj123413”. So this results in the variable userData.hashedCustomerID to have the value “123ad123sdfsj123413”.