If you’re spending money on digital marketing, you’ll presumably want to know whether it’s actually generating any business. Google Analytics can provide an enormous amount of information about how people find your website, but one thing I’ve noticed over the years is that businesses often struggle to identify which of their individual marketing campaigns are producing results. They might know that 500 people visited their website from Facebook last month, for example, but have no idea whether those visitors came from a paid advertisement, an ordinary Facebook post or a link somebody shared with their friends. Fortunately, there’s a relatively straightforward way of solving this problem, using something called UTM tracking.
UTM stands for Urchin Tracking Module, a name that originates from Urchin, the web analytics company Google acquired back in 2005 and subsequently developed into Google Analytics. Despite the rather technical-sounding name, UTM tracking is actually extremely simple, and it’s something I’d recommend using whenever you’re running marketing campaigns that direct people to your website.
What Exactly Are UTM Parameters?
Essentially, UTM parameters are small pieces of information added to the end of a website address, allowing Google Analytics to identify where a particular visitor has come from. For example, let’s say you’re running an email marketing campaign promoting a summer sale, and you want to know how many visitors arrive through the links in your newsletter. Rather than simply linking to your homepage, you could use an address like this:
Although the address looks considerably longer, it still takes visitors to exactly the same page. The difference is that Google Analytics can now identify the source of the traffic as your newsletter, the marketing medium as email and the campaign as your summer sale. This information can then be used to analyse how visitors from that particular campaign behave, including whether they make a purchase or submit an enquiry.
There are five main UTM parameters available, although you generally only need to use three of them. The utm_source parameter identifies where the visitor came from, such as Facebook, Google or a particular newsletter, while utm_medium describes the type of marketing activity, such as email, CPC advertising or social media. The utm_campaign parameter identifies the specific campaign, allowing you to group together traffic generated through several different channels. Two additional parameters, utm_term and utm_content, can be used to identify paid search keywords or distinguish between different advertisements and links.
Why Is This Better Than Normal Analytics Tracking?
You might be wondering why any of this is necessary when Google Analytics already tells you where your visitors come from. After all, if somebody clicks a link on Facebook, shouldn’t Google Analytics automatically recognise that the visitor arrived from Facebook?
In many circumstances it will, but that doesn’t necessarily tell you which marketing activity generated the visit. If you’re running several Facebook campaigns simultaneously, you’ll probably want to distinguish between them rather than simply looking at the total number of visitors coming from the platform.
Email marketing presents another problem, because links opened through certain email applications don’t always provide referral information. Without UTM parameters, those visits can end up being classified as Direct traffic, making it difficult to establish how effective your newsletters have been.
By adding UTM parameters to your campaign links, you’re explicitly telling Google Analytics how the traffic should be categorised, rather than relying entirely on whatever referral information happens to be available.
How Do You Create UTM Links?
Fortunately, you don’t need to understand programming or manually construct complicated website addresses. Google provides a free Campaign URL Builder that allows you to enter your website address and the relevant campaign information, before automatically generating a properly formatted URL.
For example, imagine you’re running a Facebook advertising campaign promoting a new range of office furniture. You might enter facebook as the source, cpc as the medium and office_furniture as the campaign name. If you were testing two different advertisements, you could also use the content parameter to distinguish between them, allowing you to compare their performance in Google Analytics.
One thing I’d strongly recommend is establishing a consistent naming convention before you start creating links. Google Analytics treats Facebook and facebook as different values, so if different employees use different naming conventions, you could end up with several separate entries for what should actually be the same traffic source.
It’s also worth being careful with the medium parameter, as Google Analytics uses this information to categorise traffic into its default channel groupings. Using an unusual value might result in traffic being classified under Other rather than the channel you were expecting.
Where Can You See the Results?
Once somebody clicks one of your tagged links, the campaign information becomes available within Google Analytics. Using Universal Analytics, you can find your campaign reports under Acquisition > Campaigns > All Campaigns, where you’ll be able to compare the traffic generated by different marketing activities.
You can also examine the source and medium associated with those visits, along with various other metrics such as bounce rate, average session duration and the number of pages viewed.
However, I’d argue that the most important information is whether those visitors actually complete the objectives you’ve established for your website. If you’re running an ecommerce business, you’ll presumably be interested in purchases and revenue, while a service-based business might concentrate on contact form submissions or telephone enquiries.
By configuring Goals or Ecommerce tracking within Google Analytics, you can begin comparing campaigns based on the results they generate rather than simply how many visitors they attract.
Don’t Forget About Google Ads
One important consideration is that you don’t necessarily need to manually add UTM parameters to your Google Ads campaigns. Google Ads has an auto-tagging feature that can automatically append a Google Click Identifier, or GCLID, to the URLs used by your advertisements.
When Google Ads and Google Analytics are correctly linked, this allows more detailed information about your advertising campaigns to be shared between the two platforms, including campaign performance and advertising costs.
Personally, I’d generally recommend using auto-tagging for Google Ads rather than manually adding UTM parameters, although there are circumstances where manual tagging might still be appropriate. For other platforms, such as Facebook advertising and email marketing, UTM parameters are an extremely useful way of maintaining consistent campaign reporting.
Are There Any Disadvantages?
There aren’t many, although it’s possible to make a mess of your analytics data if you’re not careful. Aside from inconsistent naming conventions, one mistake I’d particularly recommend avoiding is adding UTM parameters to links between pages on your own website.
UTM parameters are designed to identify external marketing campaigns, and using them for internal navigation can overwrite the campaign attribution associated with an existing visit. This could result in Google Analytics attributing conversions to your own website links rather than the marketing activity that originally attracted the visitor.
It’s also important to remember that UTM tracking doesn’t automatically tell you whether a campaign is profitable. You’ll still need to understand how much you’ve spent, what conversions you’ve generated and how valuable those conversions are to your business.
Personally, I think UTM tracking is one of the simplest and most useful things you can implement to improve your marketing reporting, particularly if you’re running campaigns across several different platforms. It costs nothing to use, requires very little technical knowledge and can help answer questions that would otherwise be surprisingly difficult to investigate.
Ultimately, there’s little point spending hundreds or thousands of pounds promoting your business if you can’t establish which activities are producing worthwhile results, and adding a few parameters to your website links is a relatively small amount of effort for the additional information it can provide.