Hmmm

In the context of moaning yesterday afternoon about adverts from the people from whom I usually buy cheese popping up all over the place, mentioning another cheese supplier who probably would not be so into e-commerce (reference 1), resulted in an email advertisement from them this morning.

Clicking on the link provided delivered an address with suffix 'utm_campaign=emailmarketing_116252672180&utm_medium=email&utm_source=shopify_email'. Whereupon Google loses no time telling me that urchin tracking modules (UTM) are one of the ways to track performance from any digital marketing campaign ... a simple code that can be attached to any URL to generate Google Analytics data for digital campaigns. Presumably the '116252672180' bit is a Google/Shopify identifier for the cheese company in question.

While Shopify appears from reference 2 to be, inter alia, a Canadian e-commerce platform. The about bit at the bottom of the page tells me that [for a fee] 'Shopify powers over 1,700,000 businesses worldwide: the all-in-one commerce platform to start, run, and grow a business'. So quite big enough to do the necessary to plug all their customers into Google, Facebook, Uncle Tom Cobblers and all.

Hmmm.

Reference 1: http://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/04/time-for-white.html.

Reference 2: https://www.shopify.co.uk/.