How can you measure your marketing campaigns using UTM parameters in order to understand from where the users came and evaluate the results of your acquisition efforts with Google Analytics?
Before starting let’s answer an important question: why do we need UTM parameters at all? The UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) parameters help you to measure the performance of your channels. You want to attribute the users to the right channel to figure out how to best allocate your Marketing budget. The UTM parameters are specifically meant to communicate with Google Analytics enabling the tool to fill the acquisition reports.
Let’s have a look at the URL below as an example:
We probably saw many times a similar URL. We want to discover together the meaning of each part:
- “?” : URLs often have the question mark. Sometimes those question marks communicate with the server and the content changes. In our case, content won’t change because the parameters that we see at the end of the URL are fixed.
- utm_source=gmail&utm_medium=email&utm_content=newsletter”: it is the tale of our URL, it is technically called query string which consists of different parameters. The parameters are separated by “&” sign. When someone arrives on that landing page, the parameters are telling Google Analytics to assign the user to utm_medium=email and utm_source=gmail instead of categorizing it under the undefined direct/none.
There are 5 different UTM parameters that can be added to URLs.
1. utm_source: it spots the advertiser that is sending traffic to your website: it can be google, facebook etc...
2. utm_medium: it identifies the advertising/marketing medium: e.g. cpc, email newsletter
3. utm_campaign: it is the specific campaign name, promotional code, slogan
4. utm_content: it helps to differentiate similar content. Lets assume that in the same newsletter you have two different CTAs. By using utm_content, you can figure out from which CTA you got most of the conversions
5. utm_term: it pinpoints the paid search keywords
💡While utm_content and utm_term are nice-to-have, you should always use utm_source, utm_medium and utm_campaign to ensure that tracking is properly done.
💡Ensure that you separate the URL from your UTMs using a question mark. Note that Google Analytics is case sensitive so utm_source=facebook won’t be the same of utm_source=Facebook.
💡The order in which you add the UTMs doesn’t matter.
You can find here a UTM Tracking Sheet that will help you to set UTM tracking. Please make a copy before you start to edit it.
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