UTM parameters in tracking

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Being a marketer comes with a responsibility of figuring out which marketing campaigns are working and which are not. A good marketing professional is someone who can not only figure out the impact a specific campaign has but also be able to explain it to the client in a way that is easily understandable to them as well.

You know that the campaigns that you are running are working and driving traffic towards your intended pages. But it is also important to figure out which campaigns are more successful than others and which needs improvement. This information is not only necessary for you but also gives you a chance to properly communicate the effectiveness of your work and improve it. UTM tracking allows you to gather all this information and more. In this article we will learn what utm tracking is, how utm codes can be used to measure success of marketing campaigns and how Engage allows you to combine UTM tracking with its own powerful algorithms and give you complete consolidated reports with actionable insights.

What is UTM Tracking?

UTM tracking allows you to figure out which marketing channels are driving the most traffic towards your website. By using specialized URLs on different online marketing channels, crucial insights regarding these campaigns can be gained. These insights can then be used to optimize and improve marketing campaigns and get the best out of your marketing budget.

UTM tracking allows you to monitor various aspects for different marketing channels. Let's take a deeper look into what UTM tracking can actually do for you.

Social media marketing analysis

UTM tracking can be used for A/B testing of your social media marketing campaigns. This not only tells you about the effectiveness of certain marketing channels as compared to others but also gives you great insights in your visitor's behavior. For example, once you figure out which campaign is working better on a particular platform and is increasing website traffic, you can then analyze the content of that campaign to figure out what it is that your viewers are liking. In this way you can optimize your social media campaigns to get better results.

Traffic sources and influx analysis

One of the major benefits of UTM tracking is that it allows you to figure out how much traffic is coming to your website along with its source. The ability to track traffic to its source is very beneficial especially when it comes to marketing teams.

It also allows you to figure out traffic from which source is converting into customers and which source does not have a very successful conversion rate. Analytics tools like Engage allow you to use the benefits of UTM codes and segment your customers according to their sources and profitability. Equipped with this information businesses can figure out whether they want to invest more or less in a particular marketing channel as compared to others.

Email marketing analysis

Our analytics tool Engage allows you to perform A/B testing on your email marketing campaigns and we use utm codes to maximize the benefits of this testing.

Let's suppose you send two different emails to your customers and both emails contain a link which has a utm code attached to it. Once the emails are sent we use utm codes to figure out which link has been effective in driving traffic towards the website. By tracking the traffic back to its source we can figure out which email marketing campaign was more effective and drove more traffic.

This information can be used to analyze the content and structure of emails sent and optimize the future email campaigns accordingly.

What are UTM Codes and UTM parameters?

UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) code is a bit of text that can be added to an URL and which gives crucial information to Google analytics or other tools such as Engage, regarding performance of a campaign. UTM tracking url can be used to track the traffic on a website right to its source and gives a more detailed view of success of a marketing campaign.

A question that is often asked is why does one need UTM tracking when there are tools like Engage that can already tell website owners where the traffic on their website is coming from. And yes Engage does have an AI based infrastructure that tracks where the traffic is coming from but once it gets equipped with the tracking capabilities of UTM codes the level of detail of analysis can be enhanced manifold.

For example, Engage can easily differentiate between the traffic that is coming towards your website from different sources such as Google ads, Facebook, Twitter or any other social media platform. However, if there are multiple campaigns running on one platform, UTM links can be used to figure out which particular campaign that traffic is coming from.

This can be utilized by Engage to produce highly detailed analysis reports regarding effectiveness of different campaigns and marketing channels.

UTM code Example:

An example of UTM codes is shown below:

https://blog.zubi.ai/why-business-analytics-is-important?utm_campaign=blogpost &utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook

In the link above the part of the URL after the ? are snippets of codes that allows your analytics program to better categories the traffic when someone lands on this page by clicking this particular link. It is important to notice that the landing page itself is not changed at all by adding UTM code.

The above link ensures that the traffic that comes on this page by clicking this particular link should be categorized in the following manner:

• The name of this campaign is "Blogpost"

• The medium is "Social"

• The traffic source is "Facebook post"

In order to put things into perspective this link can be attributed to a Facebook post that shares this particular blog on the company's social media platform. When people click through the link and come to the page, the marketing team will know exactly how many people landed on the page via the Facebook post and how many visitors came from any other source.

UTM parameters and examples:

There are five different UTM parameters or UTM tracking values that can be used to categorise or keep track of the different factors associated with any particular campaign. It is important to note that it is not necessary to add all five UTM parameters in every UTM campaign, in fact you can build a utm code using one or two UTM tags as well.

These UTM parameters are discussed in detail below.

• Campaign

The campaign UTM tag allows you to keep track of all the traffic that comes to your website from different marketing channels associated with a certain campaign or promotion. Campaign names can be added in the link to keep a better track of traffic coming from different sources. For example if your company is running a 10% off campaign and it has ads placed on different social media platforms then it would make sense to keep track of the number of visitors this overall campaign brings to your online platform.

An example of this parameter would be utm_campaign=10percentoff

• Source

The source UTM parameter ensures that you have all the information regarding the number of visitors that are coming from different sources or websites on which you are running your campaign. If we take the example as discussed above. Lets suppose that you are running the promotion on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram but you want to know exactly how many visitors are coming from Twitter. In this case source utm parameter will be used.

An example of this parameter would be utm_source=Twitter

• Medium

The medium utm tag allows you to differentiate the traffic that is coming from different marketing mediums. In the above mentioned campaign, let's suppose along with running different ads via social media posts you are also doing email marketing of the promotion. It would make sense to figure out how much traffic is coming from social media posts and how much of it is coming from email marketing.

An example of medium UTM code would be utm_medium=emailmarketing

• Content

The content utm code is used when there are two or more links that are pointing towards a particular page when the medium and source is the same. For example an email that you sent out contained two links going to the same page, one at the start of the email and one at the end. In order to optimise your emails in the future you should know which link drives more traffic towards the page.

An example of utm tags in this case would be utm_content=pagetop and utm_content=pagebottom

• Term

This parameter really shows how effective and how deep the insights gained from utm parameters can be. The term tag can be used to figure out which Google ads campaign has been effective for you and which is not producing required results. Let's suppose that you ran two marketing campaigns and paid Google to rank you under the following keywords "Best Shoes" and "Best Clothes". In order to know the traffic originated from both campaigns separately you need to use the term tags.

Example of term tags in this case would be utm_term=bestshoes and utm_term=bestclothes

Benefits of UTM Tracking:

UTM tracking can be extremely beneficial for the marketing teams of any organisation as they give us detailed insights regarding various factors affecting campaigns. It gives us solid evidence based reports as to which campaigns are producing results and which are bleeding money.

It is very easy to create UTM codes as these can be created Google campaign builder in Google analytics as well as using several online UTM code builders. The data gathered through utm tracking can be viewed and used in Google analytics. However, using Engage, our data gathering and analysis tool you can get the best out of your data. We make actual actionable reports using which you can make informed business decisions and optimise your marketing budget as well as campaigns.

UTM tracking ensures that you know where you are spending your money when it comes to marketing and how much of that is actually giving you a good ROI. It is always good to have a better insight of which paid campaigns are producing best results so you can invest in those smartly. If you are still confused regarding functionality or working of UTM tracking or want to know how Engage can help you in setting it all up, please reach out and our experts would love to guide you!