Back in the day (2005), Matt Cutts said "use dashes, not underscores" in URLs. But that was before search engines got smart, and now it seems it doesn't really matter what you use in canonical URLs.
But what about URLs with UTMs? How can dashes vs. underscores help us understand traffic in Google Analytics?
B2C published a blog post in September 2013 analyzing the different ways that different companies use UTMs in email marketing materials. At the end of the Gilt City email, the author says:
An underscore should be used in “san-francisco” part of utm_campaign. This tells us it is one word and separates it from the other information.
When the author gets to the Zillow email, he mentions:
Separating different pieces of information by a dash (“-”) helps to parse them easily in analytics tools.
I'm modestly savvy with Google Analytics, and I'm having trouble seeing the advantage of using an underscore to link compound phrases such as promoted link
, sponsored story
, sidebar ad
or other multi-word phrases that I might choose to regularly use in my company's UTM schema.
Is there an advantage in Google Analytics to linking these words one way or the other?