Tracking with UTM Codes
An important aspect of marketing is measuring results. Before the internet, marketing was viewed as a creative field. There were limited methods for measure the effectiveness of a marketing campaign. For majority of marketing channels it was impossible to identify exactly which advertisement was responsible for achieving the sale. Digital marketing has changed all of this. This is why more and more brands are moving towards marketing online instead of in traditional media. As a marketer, you want to be able to identify which of your efforts lead to the result you were trying to achieve. UTM codes are a labeling system which identifies your inbound traffic as it relates to your marketing. UTM stands for “Urchin Tracking Module” and was created by Urchin Software Corporation which was acquired by Google in 2005. Urchin’s software become what is now known as Google Analytics.
https://www.marketingbull.co/?utm_campaign=blogpost&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook
As you have probably noticed when browsing the internet, UTM codes is a long string of text affixed to a URL of a website. For example, the UTM codes above tell our marketing department that the visitor to our website came from a social source, Facebook to be exact.
You can use the bare minimum; campaign, source and medium to track all of your links, and get extremely specific about your tracking. The great news is that Google Analytics automatically recognized UTM codes, and will allow you to filter and search by UTM codes without you having to configure it.
Google has a helpful tool to write UTM codes, the Google URL builder. The tool will help you create all the parameters of a UTM code easily.
URL Shorteners:
You can use URL shorteners in conjunction with UTM Codes. This combination achieves the following; it will hide your UTM codes, it will provide a short, easy to type URL for your visitors and add a layer of trackability since most URL shortener providers offer additional tracking on these URLS.
More information and examples for each parameter
The following table gives a detailed explanation and example of each of the campaign parameters:
| Parameter | Required | Example | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
|
Campaign ID utm_id |
|
campaign_1_ad_3 |
Most important in the string, this variable identifies a specific ad in the a campaign, depending how your ad names are structured, this is a unique identifier. |
|
Campaign Source utm_source |
✓ |
|
Helps track and identify from where the result came, a search engine, or newsletter (email), or other source like a referral web site or affiliate id. |
|
Campaign Medium utm_medium |
✓ |
cpc |
In addition to cost-per-click calculations for a campaign, this variable can help track the various platform and mediums the click through occurred on. |
|
Campaign Name utm_campaign |
|
spring_sale |
Used for keyword analysis. Use utm_campaignto identify a specific product promotion or strategic campaign. |
|
Campaign Term utm_term |
|
running+shoes |
This variable helps rack the terms used to arrive at the result for the link. |
|
Campaign Content utm_content |
|
logolink |
In addition to A/B testing, this variable can carry deep targeting tracking such as the element clicked on a page. |