How to Create and Configure a New Project
A Project is a container that holds all your URLs, UTMs (utm_campaign, utm_medium, utm_source, utm_content and utm_term), custom parameters, presets, conventions, settings, and other data.
It can be used to separate tracking URLs, UTMs, conventions, etc. for different websites, teams, etc. Large companies may use one project per team (e.g. social media, email, ads, etc.). You can use one project for each office if your company has several offices.
It highly depends on how your marketing team is structured and how team members work together. You can give someone access to only one project (say, with limited permissions) and they won’t see other projects in your account.
Since most of the work in Terminus happens inside a project, it’s good to understand how to set up a project and configure it as per your needs.
Here are some steps to set up a project and get the most out of Terminus. All of them may not be applicable to your requirements and you can skip the ones that you don’t think are useful.
Create a new Project
When you create a new account, you may see a page to create a new project. You can also create a new project from the Dashboard.
Configure Project Settings
Some of the basic project settings look like this:
You’ll need to specify some basic settings before saving your project
- Specify the name of your project.
- If you want to prevent spaces in your UTM and custom parameters, specify the character that you would like to replace it with, e.g. underscore _
- If you need all UTM and custom parameters to be lowercase, check Force all campaign parameters to lowercase
- If you use UTM parameters, check Enable UTM parameters. If you don’t need UTM parameters, but only custom parameters, you can uncheck this item.
- If UTM parameters are enabled, you can configure which are required when building UTM tracking URLs.
- Specify the maximum number of characters for each UTM Campaign, UTM Medium, UTM Source, UTM Content, and UTM Term. (This is especially useful if your CRM or other reporting tools that handle UTM parameters have such constraints)
- Click Save to create a new project.
Even though you can change these basic settings anytime, it’s recommended to finalize them before you create a lot of data in your project.
You can also configure some Advanced Settings if you desire. Click Show to expand these options.
The settings provide an explanation of what they do.
You can change these anytime after creating a project by going to Settings from the project navigation.
Configure URL Shortener (optional)
When you build UTM (and/or custom) tracking URLs, you might additionally want to shorten them before sharing.
You have the following options:
- By default, all URLs will be shortened with Terminus shortener using domain ter.li. If this works for you, there's nothing else you need to do.
- Use your own custom domain for shortening.
- Connect your own Bitly account to shorten URLs instead of using a Terminus shortener.
If you don’t use short URLs when sharing your UTM tracking URLs, you can ignore this section. You can even Disable shortening in Project Settings.
Create Presets (optional)
Presets are used to save a combination of UTM values to be used later. For example, you might have a long-running campaign for sharing your blog posts on Twitter, e.g.
utm_campaign = blog
utm_medium = social
utm_source = twitter
You can create a new preset, say “Twitter Blog Sharing” and save these UTM values. When building a new tracking URL, you can select this preset instead of typing/selecting individual UTM values. This makes URL building much quicker and less error-prone.
If you know what presets you need, you can create them in advance, if you like. Or you can also make them as part of building UTM tracking URLs.
If your UTM parameter values are complex, say a combination of multiple fields joined by a separator (e.g hypen “-“), conventions might be better suitable for that purpose.
Configure Custom Parameters (optional)
If you need to track some URL parameters in addition to UTM parameters, you can also define them in Terminus.
For example, you can define a custom parameter, say coupon. This will help you build a tracking URL with a coupon as one of the parameters.
www.example.com?coupon=50percentoff&utm_campaign=summer_sale&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social
If you need such custom parameters, you can look at these articles:
Define Conventions (optional)
Conventions are a powerful feature in Terminus that help you define complex formats for your UTM and custom parameters. They can be used to configure UTM URL builder dynamically to your own naming conventions.
Conventions drastically reduce any need for documentation for your UTM and custom formats/templates. Once configured, the UTM URL builder is customized only to accept values in your own defined format.
You can build a wide variety of conventions with various constraints and dependencies. See these articles for details:
Create Labels (optional)
Labels can be used to group URLs within a project. A URL can have multiple labels. You can use labels to search for certain URLs and perform bulk operations on them including CSV downloads.
In most cases, you can create and add labels as part of building URLs. But you can also create them in advance for you and your team.
Other features
- Preset Groups (Tools > Preset Groups)
- Info Fields (Tools > Info Fields)
- Redirect codes (Tools > Redirect codes)
- Project Notes (Settings > Notes)
- Rearrange/select tracking parameters (Settings > Tracking parameters)
- Create exportable GA Data sets (Settings > GA Data Sets)
- Create exportable Adobe Classifications (Settings > Adobe Classifications)
- See campaign reports for clicks
- Build UTM-tracked emails
- Add users with appropriate permission level ([Top right corner] > Manage Users)
Questions?
Even though this article gives a quick overview of how to set up a project, it’s not exhaustive. We constantly release new features, and this guide may not cover them. Please feel free to look around your account and get in touch with us if you have any questions.