With fierce competition, evolving markets, and rapid changes in customer buying habits, digital marketing campaigns are expected to perform and prove ROI (return on investment). This makes tracking campaigns and the individual elements within them not only a smart decision but a necessity. Now more than ever as marketing budgets are tightening, it’s vital to determine what’s most effective, optimize campaigns based on data, and modify or eliminate poor performers.
UTM (urchin traffic monitor) parameters are one of the tools designed to help you make informed decisions about your digital marketing efforts. Below we define what a UTM is and outline best practices related to UTM parameters, including when and how to use UTMs and how to set them up.
What are UTM parameters?
A UTM is a small piece of customizable code added to the end of a URL (web address). UTMs track where your web traffic comes from and help you separate the traffic you send to your site due to marketing efforts, versus traffic coming from elsewhere. UTM tags allow analytics software, such as Google Analytics, to track digital campaign traffic, giving you valuable insight into campaign performance. You can even track by campaign name, source, medium, keywords and phrases, and content. We’ll get into these details later in this guide.
Below is an example of a simple UTM that tracks Google as the source—the place where you shared the link that sent traffic to your website. Notice that UTMs are placed after the question mark.
URL example without UTM parameters:
https://yourexcellentwebsite.com
URL example with simple UTM parameters:
https://yourexcellentwebsite.com?utm_source=google
How marketers use UTM parameters to make better decisions
Digital marketing campaigns are usually spread across multiple channels. For example, you may promote a new product via Google Ads, with an email blast, and on social media. How do you know how much traffic each of these is individually driving to your website? UTMs offer an answer. Just apply a unique UTM tag in the link for each.
Not only do UTMs indicate where traffic comes from, but you can also use them to track specific marketing tactics across your online marketing efforts. UTMs are especially useful when you’re conducting an A/B test. A/B testing, also known as split testing, is the process of comparing two versions of a creative, such as a digital ad and an email ad, to determine the difference in their performance.
UTMs can be applied to all of your digital marketing initiatives, including, but not limited to:
- Social media: Without UTMs it can be difficult to track the sources of ROI in social media campaigns. For example, if you place a display ad with a link to your website on Twitter and Instagram, you can determine which social media platform delivered the most traffic to your website using UTM parameters that identify each social media platform.
- Email: Let’s say you’re sending emails with click-through capability to current customers and previous customers announcing a new product. Using different UTMs for each customer group, you can determine how much traffic is being generated by each customer group, not just via email alone.
- Display/Banner Ads: Attaching a UTM tag to your URL link in a digital display or a banner ad helps you identify the volume of traffic they deliver to your website, but you can take it a step further. If you’re running a different ad on each for a specific product or service, assigning different UTMs will tell you which ad copy is driving the most traffic.
- Blogs: Have you ever uploaded a blog to different blog sites, and then wondered how much traffic each site drove to your website? You can identify this by attaching a unique UTM tag to each link. If you just want to know how much traffic volume in general your blogs are producing, use the same UTM tag on each.
- PPC: UTMs for PPC is especially valuable for companies who don’t have integration between PPC channels (Google and Bing) and their CRM (customer relationship management) technology.
- Video: Videos are becoming an essential marketing tool, along with the use of video platforms such as YouTube. UTM tags on YouTube ad links, for example, enable you to identify which videos are generating the most traffic.
How do you generate UTMs?
Adding a UTM parameter at the end of a URL seems simple enough, but it takes more than this to get the best performance from UTM tags. Before you begin generating UTMs, create a well-developed strategy focused on consistency, naming convention rules, and other policies. One of the most basic things to adhere to is keeping your UTMs easy to read and non-redundant.
There are five types of traffic-tracking UTM parameters you can add to a URL.
5 Types of UTM parameters
- Campaign name, utm_campaign
Indicates the name of the campaign to track, such as a product launch name, a service upgrade name, a contest name, a specific promotion name, and so on.
- Source, utm_source
Identifies the place where you shared the link—the traffic source, e.g. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, newsletter. For example, if both a LinkedIn post and a Facebook post link to a product demo video on your website, assigning descriptive source UTMs will indicate which delivered more traffic.
- Medium, utm_medium
Identifies what type of traffic the visitor originated from, such as social, email, display, CPC (cost per click)
- Term, utm_term
The ‘term’ parameter tracks key phrases or keywords in paid ads. Let’s say you’re running a new Google Ad with the keywords “pet sitter” and another with the keywords “dog walker,” and want to know which keywords generated the most interest and resulting traffic to your website through the ad. Once again, UTMs answer this question.
- Content, utm_content
The ‘content’ parameter enables you to track different ads within a campaign and compare their performance. This is especially useful for A/B testing. For example, if you have two ads spread across channels that promote a new software product, one offering a free two-week trial and the other offering one free month with a one-year subscription, assigning a unique content UTM to each will enable you to determine which promotion is resonating best with customers.
With the appropriate strategies and processes in place, generating basic UTM tags is straightforward. Below are examples of UTM tags for each of the five UTM parameters using the URL http://yourexcellent website.com.
Example of URL with Campaign UTM:
https://yourexcellentwebsite.com?utm_campaign=holiday_sale
Example of URL with Source UTM:
https://yourexcellentwebsite.com/utm_source=facebook
Example of URL with Medium UTM:
https://yourexcellentwebsite.com?utm_medium=display_ad
Example or URL with Content UTM:
https://yourexcellentwebsite.com?utm_content=video_ad
Example or URL with Term UTM:
https://yourexcellentwebsite.com?utm_term=dog_walker
These simple examples, however, aren’t typically used in practice because marketing managers usually want to track multiple variables. This is done by using two or more UTM parameters together in one link, separated by an ampersand (&) symbol.
Example of two UTMs in one link, campaign (holiday sale) and source (Facebook).
https://yourexcellentwebsite.com/utm_campaign=holiday_sale&utm_source=facebook
In fact, in many if not most cases you’ll want to use the campaign as a “foundational” UTM tag, making sure it is labeled the same way when using all other UTM types with it.
Below is an example of three UTM tags in a link, campaign, source, and content.
https://yourexcellentwebsite.com/utm_campaign=holiday_sale&utm_source=facebook&utm_content=video_ad
Tips on using UTMs
Create easy-to-understand, descriptive UTM tags. Avoid developing cryptic UTM tags with codenames like B52, which will need to be deciphered. Additionally:
- Be specific: Vague UTM tags or tags that are too high level hinder you from tracking specifics, so make sure to be specific. For instance, if you’re running a digital ad on Instagram, use Instagram or “Insta” in the UTM versus social media. Even if you start only using Instagram for digital ads, develop a naming convention that will remain useful as you branch out.
- Create a consistent pattern/naming convention: Without consistently using the same format when creating UTM tags, your campaigns may show up on different lines in Google Analytics.
- Lowercase parameters: UTM tags are case-sensitive. Using lowercase tags helps Google Analytics categorize sessions correctly. For example, utm_source=facebook is different from utm_source=Facebook. Using lowercase only as a rule helps you avoid this kind of mistake.
- Don’t share a link with the parameters: Sharing a link with a long string of UTM parameters can confuse recipients and appear sloppy. Instead, create a branded link, which is a shorter version of a URL, to share online.
- Track your UTMs: Establish a spreadsheet or another means of easily tracking all the UTMs you’ve created and used. This helps keep members of the marketing team who use the UTMs on track and avoid redundancy.
Conclusion/Next steps
UTMs aren’t the only solution to understanding the performance of your digital marketing campaigns, but they can provide valuable insight and enable you to make data-driven decisions that ultimately prove, and improve, ROI.
