Marketing makes no sense without analytics. When doing any promotional campaigns, it’s a good idea to monitor inputs and other activities on the website. With the help of UTM tags, you can identify traffic from external sources. Is it worth betting on UTM? What are the types of UTM parameters? What are the benefits of using UTM parameters? Here we go.
UTM – what is it?
Urchin Tracking Module. Parameters added to the end of a URL. Digging around in Google Analytics, you’ll find a lot about the source of your website’s user acquisition. But the more information you have, the more you know what’s working in your campaigns and what needs to be improved.
Ok, you will say that Analytics is still being improved. You’re right. The trouble is that Google is still not doing a perfect job of accurately identifying inbound traffic. That’s what you can learn from UTM tags. Want to minimize the occurrence of unidentified traffic in your analytics reports? Apply individual UTMs to all your marketing activities. It’s still an absolute must have for every marketer.
A UTM consists of five tags.
Source is the source of the traffic. You know exactly where the user came to the site from.
Medium is the type of traffic. You know whether the user came from emailing, paid ads or other online campaigns.
Campaign is the name of a specific campaign. It is useful for housekeeping issues. It allows you to quickly determine which campaigns are promising, which need tweaking, which are misplaced.
Content – this UTM parameter is useful for determining which URL brought the user to your site. For example, if you are sending a mailing with several different links, you can use this UTM parameter to see which link is generating the most traffic.
Term is the keywords used in a specific campaign. In combination with Google’s keyword planner and other keyword-checking tools, UTM tags allow you to extract the most promising phrases.
Usually the first three tags are enough. They tell you virtually everything you need to analyze your marketing campaigns.
How to create UTM codes?
You can tag UTMs manually. It’s not complicated, just time-consuming. There are various generators on the web that will do it for you. We recommend the UTM generator from Google – it is simple and intuitive, and gives you an instant preview of what the URL will look like.
It is good practice to standardize UTM tagging rules across the company. Agree within the team to assign specific tags to different marketing activities. Ideally, write down the rules and apply them like dogma. It will come in handy as campaigns become more and more numerous, and we know from experience that sooner rather than later the need to reach for historical data will arise. With structured UTM tags this is easier.
Note – there are a few things that are better avoided.
Don’t use spaces, instead choose a hyphen or hyphen.
Avoid capital letters. It is best to adopt the rule that they will always be lowercase.
Don’t make URLs too long. When making a URL too long, use a link shortener. Why? A long URL can discourage users, and in the case of mailings, stretched links can be treated as spam by email systems.
It also makes little sense to tag the UTM of internal links on your site.
Where is UTM link tagging useful?
Even in offline campaigns. By putting up a poster somewhere, you theoretically don’t know how many people will be interested in your company and go to your website. But you only need to add a QR code to the poster and give UTM parameters in the link to find out if this form of advertising has done its job.
You will use UTM tagging in your Social Media campaigns, dividing traffic according to your analytical needs: we suggest dividing it into organic (reach of your posts without paid promotion), paid (you will check if promoting your posts pays off and, among other things, adjust advertising budgets thanks to this). You also need UTM parameters to analyze your Google Ads campaigns: linked appropriately, banners or other forms of advertising will give you an answer as to which actions are worth continuing. Of course, you will also find all the data in the Ads panel, but UTMs are usually the fastest way to check if everything is ok.
You will also find the benefits of using UTM parameters in marketing mailings. Mailings are still one of the most effective communication tools. Done well – and, above all, automated – they can build better customer loyalty and sell more. In most mailing systems, you’ll see what recipients of your messages clicked on. However, you can collectively (and more quickly) check this data directly in Google Analytics. As we wrote above, as a rule you put several different links in one e-mail. Add the UTM parameter and find out which links clicked better. This is valuable knowledge: with it you can correct the creations of your e-mails and create messages that are better received by customers.
Use UTMs for sponsored articles published on external sites. Remember that they should always be dofollow links – otherwise the external service will not give up its “power” to your website when linking to it. By analyzing the data coming from such a site with the help of UTM tags, you will check whether buying a sponsored article on a particular site makes business sense and pays off.
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