Marketers must analyze a set of data to understand and showcase which posts or tweets have generated leads, or which didn’t work well with the audience. For any organization to work well, it needs to monitor its marketing strategies. After measuring the impact of marketing, you can understand which areas need improvement. UTM tracking links are one such metric that tracks the performance of marketing activities. These are small text snippets known as Urchin Tracking Module or Urchin Traffic Monitor (UTM) codes, attached toward the end of URLs.

These modules assist in tracking where the traffic at a website comes from when viewers click a particular link directing to this URL. The name UTM originates from Urchin Tracker which is a web analytics software. Marketers personalize this text as per the webpage where the UTM tracking links are linked for chalking up the success of a campaign to the desired content pieces. These codes are also referred to as tracking tags or UTM parameters and they aid in tracking the traffic on a website right from its origin.

Format of a UTM Code

A UTM tracking link looks somewhat as shown below. You can create a tracking URL as per this format.

http://xyz?utm_campaign=blog &utm_medium=social&utm_source=linkedin

Let us break down and understand what comprises this link:

• http://xyz: This is known as the base URL of a webpage. It is a continuous element of the website.
• ?: This symbol alerts the analytics software that a thread of UTM codes will follow.
• utm_campaign=blog: This is the initial parameter of UTM, particularly for the campaign that a website visitor has engaged with a blog or a post.
• &: This signifies that a different UTM code will follow.
• utm_medium=social: This parameter denotes the channel from where the visitor came from. Here, it is social.
• &: This signifies that a different UTM code will follow.
• utm_source=linkedin: This is the final parameter signifying the website from where a visitor came from. For example, here it is LinkedIn.

Including such code snippets following the question mark symbols does not impact anything on a webpage. Moreover, it signals your analytics software that someone has visited via a specific source in a marketing channel and for a particular campaign.

UTM Tracking

There is a format of links for monitoring the performance of your content and marketing campaigns. The UTM tracking involves the inclusion of a UTM code snippet toward the end of a particular URL for tracking the traffic sources of the website.

Best Practices

Elaborated below are a few best practices for developing and utilizing URLs for UTM tracking:

• Ensure that your links and URLs are easy to read, consistent, and clean (you will want to create a standard format for UTM parameters or link tagging to incorporate consistency).
• Keep a list of the UTM links so that everyone on your team knows which tagged links currently exist.
• Integrate UTM tracking with your CRM platform to get insights into how the bottom line is.
• Ensure specificity in UTM tracking links, and make sure the tags clearly state what is being tracked and where.
• Stick with a specific format of weather all upper or lower case as these codes are case-sensitive.
• Keep the tag names precise but descriptive (for instance, using ‘US’ instead of ‘United_States’).

Benefits of UTM Parameters

Understanding how these parameters are crucial is very important. Below are a few benefits:

• It helps to measure the ROI of the social media posts. Through this, you can analyze the reach and impact of your social media accounts.
• It helps to track the conversions accurately and study the performance of the marketing campaigns.
• It allows the A/B testing of various links.
• It helps to give the right credit to your website traffic sources to determine which is the source to drive the growth of your website.
• Audience segmentation is one of the benefits of UTM parameters. It helps you strategize your content based on the audience insights.
• It helps you make informed decisions with the help of precise data. You can allocate your budget by identifying the campaigns that aren’t performing well.

How to set up UTM codes in Google Analytics

Creating UTM codes on Google Analytics involves the stages below:

Launch Google’s Campaign URL Builder – The Google Analytics Campaign URL Builder, the third option on the list, is required for creating tracking tags on Google. Of the three types available, two help track traffic to new applications on the app marketplace.

Fill in the link attributes in the form – Visit Google Analytics Campaign URL Builder and fill in the attributes mentioned on the web page. Mention the URL, source, campaign, and medium information in the form.

Utilize the link for your marketing campaign – If you would want to shorten the link, you will need a tool such as bit.ly.

Measure the success – In case you already have the setup of Google Analytics for your website, Google will track the incoming campaigns automatically. Click on the campaigns individually to view the source and medium.

How to Utilize UTM Links for Campaigns?

• Keep track of the success of a particular promotional campaign.
• Determine how efficiently your social channels help in promoting your content and compare this to when your followers do the promotion.
• Gauge the efficacy of the traffic in guest posting referrals.
• Study the content piece across different other marketing channels.
• Track where most of the people click on a blog post’s internal links.

Conclusion

UTM parameters give you highly important metrics about your website traffic and performance. Uncover this data to redefine your marketing strategy and meet the desired results. Take note of the steps, benefits, and tools to create and use UTM traffic URLs. You can easily boost the performance and improve the ROI of your business by utilizing the metrics provided by these URLs.

Are you interested in running a successful campaign for your business? Talk to our Google Ads specialist to know more or email us at [email protected].