Add a UTM source to community events with The Events Calendar

Whether or not you’re using their Community Events add-on, there are lots of folks using The Events Calendar to showcase events from partners and in their community. For example, DowntownEugene.com is a robust source of events happening in Downtown Eugene.

It’s important to demonstrate to the folks listing events with your organization that it was worth their time and that you’re driving traffic to their events.

They could simply use referrer data, but the request’s referrer data can be lost for any number of reasons, including privacy settings, server configuration, etc. To explicitly send this data along with your visitor, it’s common to append utm parameters to URLs.

So let’s say someone submitted an event to DowntownEugene.com and in the Event Website field included a link to buy tickets. Typically, that URL might be something like https://myvenue.com/event-abc/tickets. By adding a utm_source parameter to that, it becomes easier for the venue or other partner to use a tool like Google Analytics to report on how many ticket purchases came from DowntownEugene.com. The final URL would become something like https://myvenue.com/event-abc/tickets?utm_source=DowntownEugene.com

So how can we make sure URLs have this parameter added without manually adding it to every event or asking people submitting events to include it? Easy:

add_filter('tribe_get_event_website_url', function( $url ) {
     return add_query_arg( 'utm_source', 'DowntownEugene.com', $url );
});Code language: PHP (php)

Of course, you should replace DowntownEugene.com with your website’s URL. You could even simply use the home_url() method.

Easy peasy. Hopefully you and your event partners find this helpful in demonstrating how much value your community calendar, powered by The Events Calendar, provides.