How to Create and Configure a New Project

A Project is the foundation for all of your work in Terminus. It’s a container that holds your URLs, UTM parameters, presets, conventions, and settings, ensuring your tracking data is organized and consistent from the start.

Setting up a project correctly is the first and most important step to achieving clean and reliable campaign data.

1. Creating Your Project

There are two ways to create a new Project in Terminus:

• From the main navigation: Navigate to Projects > Create a new project.

• From the Projects menu: Navigate to Projects > See All Projects, then click the Create a new Project button.

Both options will take you to the project configuration page to define its settings.

2. Configuring Project Settings

This section defines the core rules for all tracking links created within this Project.

2.1. Basic Settings

• Project Name: Enter a clear and descriptive name for your project.
• Space Character: Choose a character (like _ or -) to automatically replace any spaces in your parameter values. This prevents broken URLs.
• Prohibited Characters: List any characters (e.g., &, ?, #) that should not be allowed in your parameter values to maintain data cleanliness.
• Force all campaign parameters to lowercase: Check this box to ensure all UTM and custom parameters are automatically converted to lowercase for consistency.
• Enable UTM parameters: This is enabled by default. If you only use custom parameters, you can uncheck this.

When UTMs are enabled, you can also set rules for each parameter (Campaign, Medium, Source, Content, and Term):

• Mark specific parameters as Required.
• Set a Max character length to avoid issues with other analytics tools.
• Add a Description to guide your team on what each parameter is for.

2.2. Advanced Settings

Click Show next to Advanced Settings to expand more options for finer control over your project's behavior. Key options include:

• Preserved Characters: Preserve special characters for dynamic tracking parameters. For example, specify { and } to ensure {keyword} is not URL-encoded.
• Monitor destination URLs: Automatically check if your destination URLs are valid and reachable.
• Force conventions: Require that all tracking URLs in the project must be built using a pre-defined Naming Convention.
• Allow duplicate fully tagged URLs: Permit identical URLs to be saved in the project. This is useful if you need to store the same link with different internal metadata (like Info Fields). By default, this is disabled.
• Allow bulk operations for URLs created using conventions in Field Mode: Enable this if you need to perform bulk edits on URLs created with field-based conventions. This is disabled by default as it can be error-prone.
• Show social sharing buttons for all the URLs: Display social sharing icons for every link. If unchecked, the buttons will only appear on URLs with social-related terms (e.g., twitter, facebook).
• Use email title as UTM campaign name: When using the email tracking builder, this will automatically use the email's subject line as the value for utm_campaign.
• Detect and auto-populate UTM Content in emails: Automatically populate the utm_content parameter for each link within a tracked email, typically using the link's anchor text.
• Disable shortening: Completely turn off all URL shortening functionality for this project.
• Prefer HTTPs protocol in destination URLs: If a URL is entered without http:// or https://, this setting will automatically apply https://.

2.3. Navigation and Display Settings

You can also adjust the project's user interface to better suit your team's workflow. 

• Default Project Navigation: Choose the default page you see when opening this project. You can change the default project navigation to land on Links, Campaigns, or another page instead of the default page.

To provide your team with easy access to your company's marketing guidelines, you can also add a link to internal documentation that will appear directly in the project navigation menu.

• Link to Internal Documentation: Add a custom shortcut in the project's navigation menu that links directly to your team's external resources like style guides, campaign spreadsheets, or brand assets.
• Link Text: Specify the name for the link that will be displayed in the navigation menu (e.g., "Campaign Naming Rules").

Once you have configured all your settings, click Save to create the project.

3. Best Practices for Structuring Projects

A well-organized account makes collaboration and reporting much easier. Consider creating separate Projects based on:

• Team: Give each team (e.g., Social Media, Paid Ads, Email Marketing) its own project to keep their campaigns separate.
• Website or Brand: If you manage multiple websites or brands, create a dedicated project for each one.
• Region: For companies with multiple offices, a project for each region (e.g., North America, EMEA) can help organize local campaigns.

4. Optional Configurations (After Setup)

Once your project is created, you can further customize it to speed up your workflow and enforce consistency. These steps are optional but highly recommended for getting the most out of Terminus.

4.1. URL Shortening

When you build tracking URLs, you may want to shorten them before sharing. You have several options:

• Default Shortener: By default, all URLs will be shortened with the Terminus ter.li domain. No extra setup is needed.
• Custom Domain: For branded links, you can configure your own custom domain.
• Bitly Integration: If your team already uses Bitly, you can connect your own Bitly account to use it for shortening.

If you don't use short URLs, you can select Disable shortening in your project's Advanced Settings.

4.2. Presets

Presets save frequently used combinations of UTM values to prevent repetitive typing and reduce errors. For example, if you often share blog posts on Twitter, you could create a "Twitter Blog Sharing" preset with these values:

When building a new link, your team can select this single preset instead of filling in three separate fields. You can learn how to create a Preset in advance or save them directly from the URL builder.

4.3. Custom Parameters

If you need to track data beyond the standard UTM parameters, you can define your own. For instance, you could create a custom parameter for coupon to build URLs like this:

To get started, you can read our guide on how to create a custom parameter.

4.4. Naming Conventions

Conventions are a powerful feature for enforcing complex, standardized naming structures. They customize the URL builder itself, dynamically guiding your team to create perfectly formatted links every time. This drastically reduces the need for external documentation and eliminates inconsistent data.

You can learn more about how to create a naming convention and how your team will be using a convention in the UTM URL builder.

4.5. Labels

Labels are used to group, filter, and organize URLs within your project. A single URL can have multiple labels. You can then use these labels to quickly search for specific sets of URLs and perform bulk operations on them, including CSV downloads.

5. Related Features

With your project configured, you are ready to explore more advanced features. Here are some key functionalities that can further enhance your workflow and reporting:

• User Management: A crucial next step is to invite your team members. You can add users to your project and assign them specific permission levels to control what they can see and do.
• Preset Groups: As your list of Presets grows, you can organize them into logical folders called Preset Groups. This helps keep your workspace tidy, for example, by grouping all social media presets into one folder and email presets into another.
• Info Fields: As mentioned earlier, you can create custom Info Fields to store additional metadata about your URLs that is not part of the link itself, such as notes, budgets, or internal IDs.
• Project Notes: Use the Notes section within Settings to leave comments, instructions, or important updates for anyone working in the project. It's a simple way to keep your team aligned.
• Campaign Reports: Once you start generating links and getting clicks, you can analyze their performance directly within Terminus. Learn how to view and filter your campaign click reports to see which campaigns are most effective.
• Data Exports for Analytics: To streamline your reporting, you can create and set up automated export data specifically formatted for your analytics platform. 

Your project is now configured and ready for your team. By establishing a solid foundation with clear settings and conventions, you have taken the most important step toward clean, reliable, and insightful marketing data.

If you have any questions as you continue to explore the features, please feel free to contact our support team.