How Many Visitors Does Your Catalog Send to Your Website?

A reader is browsing your catalog, likes a product and clicks the link to your shop. Your catalog analytics records the click. Then the reader lands on your website, and from that moment your catalog knows nothing more.

Your website analytics, meanwhile, sees a new visitor but usually cannot say where they came from. Depending on the browser, the visit shows up as a referral from the catalog reader's address or simply as "direct". Either way, you cannot tell which catalog sent it, let alone which issue.

So the two most useful questions, how many visitors a catalog sends you and what those visitors do once they arrive, fall between two reports. UTM tags close that gap.

What UTM tags are

UTM tags are small labels added to the end of a web address. Analytics tools such as Google Analytics read them and file the visit accordingly. A tagged link looks like this:

https://yourshop.com/sofa?utm_source=flipable&utm_medium=catalog&utm_campaign=autumn-2026

Three labels do the work:

• utm_source: where the visitor came from, for example flipable;
• utm_medium: what kind of channel it was, for example catalog;
• utm_campaign: which campaign it belongs to; for a catalog, the catalog or issue name, such as autumn-2026.

The visitor does not see anything different and the page works exactly as before. The labels describe the catalog, not the reader, so they carry no personal information.

Tagging every link by hand does not work

You could add these labels to each link in your PDF before you export it. In practice nobody does it consistently: a 60-page catalog can have hundreds of links, designers add them under deadline, and one typo in a campaign name splits your report in two.

How Flipable does it for you

Flipable adds the tags at the moment a reader clicks, so your PDF stays exactly as your designer made it. You control it from the Outgoing links card on each catalog's page:

• New catalogs have it switched on by default, with flipable as the source, catalog as the medium and the catalog's own address as the campaign name. Catalogs published before this feature existed have it off; switch it on in the same card.
• You can change all three values, for example to match a naming scheme your marketing team already uses. Use letters, digits, dots, hyphens, underscores or tildes; no spaces.
• It applies to links that leave the catalog for another website, both the links that were already in your PDF and links you add with the interactive editor. Jumps to another page of the same catalog are left alone, and so are email and phone links.
• Tags already in a link are never overwritten. If a link in your PDF carries its own campaign tag, it is kept.
• Your Flipable analytics is not affected. Click reports still show the original address of each link, grouped by the site it leads to.

Where to see the results

In your website analytics, look at your traffic broken down by source, medium and campaign. In Google Analytics, for example, that is the traffic acquisition report. Visitors from your catalogs appear under the source and medium you chose, and each catalog appears as its own campaign.

From there you can follow those visitors further than any catalog report can: how many signed up, added something to their cart or placed an order. Put the two reports side by side and you have the full picture. Flipable shows how many readers clicked and where they went; your website shows what they did when they got there.

A few naming tips

• Keep source and medium the same across all your catalogs, so every catalog visit is grouped together in your reports. Let only the campaign change.
• Use one campaign name per issue or edition, such as spring-2026 and autumn-2026. The default, which uses the catalog's address, already does this.
• Stick to lowercase and hyphens. Many analytics tools treat Autumn and autumn as two different campaigns.

The other direction: which salesperson's link brought readers

UTM tags follow readers out of the catalog. To see who brought them in, give each salesperson or dealer their own link. On the catalog's page, type a name into Representative link and copy the address it creates; it ends in ?rep= and the name. Readers open the same catalog, and under Analytics → Sources, Representative links shows how many reading sessions each link opened, and how far those readers got. These are reading sessions, not customers, and anyone can add a tag to a link, so treat it as a guide to who is sharing, not as a commission report.

When to switch it off

Keep it on for links to your own website. Consider switching it off for a catalog whose links mostly lead to other companies' sites, such as partners or advertisers, if they would rather not receive your tags. Or do the opposite and use it as an argument: tell the advertiser your campaign name, and they can see exactly how many visitors your catalog sent them.

Putting it together

UTM tags are not new and not complicated. They are simply tedious to apply by hand, which is why so many catalogs go out without them. With the tags added automatically, every catalog you publish can show up in your own reports by name, and the question of what your catalog brings in finally gets a number.

To make sense of the rest of your catalog report, see Reading Your Catalog Analytics.