As a business relying on digital marketing to obtain new clients and spread awareness of your brand across a variety of platforms, it is essential to have transparency on the success of your campaigns – especially PPC ads on search engines and social media platforms that are consuming the majority of your ongoing budget.
But how are you supposed to know what exactly your audience is engaging with on your content and website? The answer lies within Urchin Tracking Module (UTM) parameters.
Created and offered by the almighty Google, a UTM is a digital tracking element that you include within your online platforms to – well, track – the actions and reactions of visitors. In this article, we will explore this handy tool in a little more detail, as well as how you can apply them to gauge the success of marketing campaigns and use insights to improve them.
What Exactly are UTM Parameters?
A UTM works by being placed at the end of a standard URL. For example, a traditional URL may look something like this:
https://exampleurl.com.au/
Once this URL has had UTM parameters appended to it, however, this changes to:
https://exampleurl.com.au/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=Jant+2021&utm_content=example+video
The example above could be for tracking a Facebook advertising campaign. The UTM parameters are six variants that marketers and businesses can utilise to track the efficacy of their campaigns, pulling out insights around traffic sources, user behaviour, and high-performing vs low-performing campaigns.
These parameters that you will find added to your URL are:
Campaign ID
This will appear as ‘utm_id’ within the URL, and is used to ascertain which of your digital marketing campaigns from which this traffic originated.
Campaign Source
You will notice this parameter as ‘utm_source’, and it is used to identify the platform of the traffic, such as Google, Facebook, or email marketing.
Campaign Medium
Look out for ‘utm_medium’, as this is the parameter stating the medium of the traffic, like those earned via paid ad campaigns, emails, or banners.
Campaign Name
This will appear as ‘utm_campaign’ in the URL, showing the name given to your campaign. This is helpful as these names make it easier to identify winning campaigns.
Campaign Term
Technically, this is an optional parameter, but it will appear as ‘utm_term’. Campaign term can be extremely insightful as it provides insight on the keywords from your Google search ads that drove traffic to your landing pages.
Campaign Content
Finally, campaign content will appear as ‘utm_content’, and is often overlooked as another optional parameter. Again, do not neglect the potential of this variant, as you can delve deeper into the winning elements of the copy or creatives from an A/B test, and measure CTRs as well as the time spent on your website by users with some context.
How Best to Use UTM Parameters
Once you have generated your UTM parameters within the URL of your landing pages, now you can progress to getting some real utility out of them.
Gather Insights on Your Website Traffic
While it is also possible to use the ‘Source/Medium’ report function available on Google Analytics to determine traffic sources, UTM parameters provide deeper insights for your wider marketing campaign. It will detail which individual ad or post within your wider strategy is contributing towards your average, monthly or weekly traffic.
If you are concerned by such a long URL potentially proving unappealing to your audiences, then there is always the option of posting it on your social media using a bit.ly link to shorten the URL with the UTM still in place, just with a cleaner look.
Gain Better Conclusions on A/B Tests
Every digital marketing campaign should have at least some A/B testing in constant motion, as it is a crucial way of refining your efforts to garner a greater return on investment. Unfortunately, it can often be hard to determine the reasons behind a certain campaign’s success, especially when any metrics or defining elements are subjective.
UTM parameters mitigate this ambiguity by allowing you to see which social content or platform is leading more users back to your site, as well as how it is being shared, the success of certain formats, and which ads are the most engaging using paid search keywords. This, by extension, can then show you which ads rear the most revenue for more repeated and profitable campaigns.
