Peak season is coming. Between Buen Fin, Black Friday and the holidays you'll send more WhatsApp campaigns than in the rest of the year, and each one competes for the same attention. The question that matters isn't how many messages went out, it's which one brought sales. Until now that was hard to answer: visits from a WhatsApp button showed up in Google Analytics or Shopify as direct traffic, with no campaign.
WhatsApp templates you create in Boom now add UTM tags to their buttons. Every visit arrives with utm_source=boom, utm_medium=whatsapp and the campaign name. What you can measure, you can improve: you see which message works and put more behind it.
How it works
Go to Templates › WhatsApp and use Create Template. Choose Call to Action or Card and add a button of type URL. Type your link as usual, for example https://yourstore.com/black-friday.
Right under the buttons you'll see Tag links for analytics, already ticked, next to the campaign name. Under each link you'll see the tags it will carry. There's nothing else to do.
The default tags are:
utm_source=boomutm_medium=whatsapputm_campaign= the template's name, lowercased, with_instead of spaces
Use Customize to change the source, medium or campaign. Empty fields use the defaults.
Measure every campaign and repeat the one that sells
Because the campaign takes the template's name, one template per campaign gives you one row per campaign in your analytics. For peak season:
- Name your templates after your campaigns, for example
buen_fin_discountandbuen_fin_free_shipping, and send each one to part of your audience. - Compare them in your analytics: sessions, carts and sales by
utm_campaign. - Double down on the winner. Send it to the rest of your audience and use it as the starting point for Black Friday.
It also works with links that change per customer. If your button ends in a variable, like an abandoned-cart link (https://yourstore.com/{{2}}), Boom adds the tags to each customer's link when the message is sent. Now you know how many carts WhatsApp brings back.
Change the tags anytime
The tags are added when each message is sent; they aren't part of what WhatsApp reviews. So you can change them later: open the template and use Edit on the Link tracking card. The change applies to the next messages, with no new WhatsApp review.
What you can't do is turn tags on for a template WhatsApp already approved, because that would change the link it reviewed. For an older template, create a new one with tags on.
Good to know
- If your link already has its own UTM tags, we keep yours and add nothing.
- If it has a
#section, likeyourstore.com/product#reviews, the link is sent untagged: anything after#never reaches your site. The form tells you. - Cookies come first. If your site asks visitors to accept cookies, Google Analytics and similar tools record the visit and its campaign only after the visitor accepts, as with any other campaign.
From the API and MCP
When you create a template with POST /api/v1/templates, add "tracking": { "utm": {} } for the default tags, or set source, medium or campaign. Without tracking, the template is created untagged. To change them later, use PATCH /api/v1/templates/{id}/tracking or the MCP tool templates_tracking_update.
Live now
Tags are available to every workspace, on every new template with link buttons. They're added to buttons only, not to links you write inside the message text. The docs have the details.
