How to measure your marketing success with UTM Parameter

The #1 Reason of successful online businesses is that they know how to measure their marketing campaigns and constantly evaluating and improving it.

What are UTM Parameters and How to use them properly?

UTM parameters are snippets of information or tags. that can be added to an original URL. When someone clicks on URL with UTM parameters, those tags are sent back to Google Analytics (as well as other analytics tools) to tell a little bit more information about each link and improve the marketing campaign classification in your analytics tool.

http://www.example.com/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=newleads

What is UTM Tracking?

Tracking is all about understanding the needs of your users and customers better by having a look at their activities on your website. Doing that, you aim for getting the most consistent and exact datasets. UTM enables that with the help of UTM Parameters.

There are 5 different parameters:

utm_source – This parameter is normally used to show where the link is placed. For example facebook, newsletter or Google.

utm_medium – Usually this parameter shows where exactly the click happened. In Addition, it’s also used to derive the channel grouping like CPC, email, social, display or solo ads.

utm_campaign – The campaign parameter indicates the purpose of the campaign.

Optional UTM Parameters

utm_term – The term parameter is made for keywords.
utm_content – You love A/B Testing? This is your Parameter! Put the information in here and see which one is more successful. E-Commerce Shops can also use it for their product categories or characteristics like color etc.

UTM-Tracking Best Practices

Use UTM-Tracking for each Link to your website, that you have control over.
Be consistent with your parameters to guarantee scalability and comparison of your campaigns.
Only use lowercase letters. And don’t use any blanks or special characters.
Never use any parameter twice (e.g. ?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=twitter).

Why are UTMs important?

a link should be able to help you answer the important question about your web traffic:

Where exactly the click is coming from?

UTM codes help you track the performance of each link. so you can see where your traffic is coming from and what’s working best.

You can use the UTM variables within the link to track general information, like:

How much traffic you’re getting from a specific email campaign, or certain social media media post.

Track fine details like how much revenue you get from your Twitter bio or which button converted most on your landing pages.

Measure the effectiveness of guest posting referral traffic.

Track the success of certain marketing initiatives.

See how well your social channels promote your content versus when your followers promote your content.

Track the same piece of content across multiple marketing channels.

See where most people click on your internal links in a blog post or sales page.

There are many, many ways to track links with UTM codes.