“What gets measured gets managed”: UTM Tracking
Once, Peter Drucker said, “What gets measured gets managed”. Considering digital marketing innovations, it is pointless to have spectacular marketing efforts if you can’t assess and track their effectiveness. This aim leads us to specialize in UTM codes.
UTM codes basically allow us to track the performance of marketing activities by adding them to the end of any URL. Although it can be done manually, there are tools that build UTM codes automatically.
Before we get there, here are the five different UTM parameters:
Source: This parameter shortly enables us to know where the traffic is coming from. Such as Facebook, Google, Twitter, newsletters, e.g. utm_source=twitter
Medium: Medium identifies what type of link visitors used. We can use that sentence for describing a medium: “This visit came via ……”. Such as cpc (cost per click), email, social, referral, organic, e.g. utm_medium=cpc
Campaign: This basically describes your campaign. For instance, if you’re planning to do a promotion for spring in 2022, your campaign name would be spring_promotion_2022, and the campaign parameter looks like this: utm_campaign=spring-promotion-2022
Until now, we know that our UTM URL should inform us about the source that people coming, their traffic type and the name of our campaign. These three parameters are mandatory to use building a UTM URL.
Content: The content specifies what was clicked to bring the user to the site in the first place. Such as a banner ad or a text link, e.g. utm_content=logo-link
Term: It identifies the keywords used in a search. This parameter is specifically applicable to sponsored search advertising, e.g. utm_term=mom-jeans
UTM codes are connected to links with the “? “ and they are connected to each other with the “&” character. Here is a complete example:
website.com/x-page/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=spring-promotion-2022&utm_content=logo-link&utm_term=mom-jeans
If Google Analytics cannot recognize the traffic source, it will be categorized as direct traffic. It’s crucial to provide UTM URLs in order to identify the source of traffic that would otherwise be classified as “direct,” which is a mysterious traffic source in Google Analytics.
UTM codes can be quickly generated using Google’s URL builder:
As a final note, your campaign, content, and source links all need to be simple to comprehend. Anyone looking at the code should be able to deduce what it implies at a glance. If you use various rules, even capitalizations or spaces will cause your analytics to be messed up by dividing the same campaigns into two. As a result, establish constant rules from the beginning.
