What is UTM?
Urchin Tracking Module (UTM) is a powerful tool used in digital marketing to measure the effectiveness of marketing campaigns and track the source of website traffic. It consists of five primary parameters that work together to provide valuable insights into how users interact with a website.
- utm_source: This parameter identifies the origin of the traffic, such as a search engine (e.g., Google, Bing), a social media platform (e.g., Facebook, Twitter), an email campaign, or a paid advertisement.
- utm_medium: This parameter specifies the type of medium through which the traffic was acquired, such as organic search, paid search, display advertising, email, or social media.
- utm_campaign: The utm_campaign parameter allows marketers to group related marketing efforts under a specific campaign name. This helps in tracking the performance of individual campaigns and comparing their effectiveness.
- utm_content: This parameter is used to differentiate between different versions of the same content or creative. For example, if you have multiple versions of an email campaign with different subject lines, you can use the utm_content parameter to track which version performed better.
- utm_term: The utm_term parameter is primarily used in paid search campaigns to track the specific keywords or search terms that users entered to find your website. This information helps in optimizing keyword targeting and improving the relevance of your search ads.
By incorporating UTM parameters into marketing campaigns, businesses can gain valuable insights such as:
- Which marketing channels are driving the most traffic to their website.
- The effectiveness of different campaigns and content variations.
- The keywords that are generating the most conversions.
- The user journey and how visitors navigate through different pages on the website.
UTM parameters are a crucial part of digital marketing analytics, providing marketers with the data they need to make informed decisions, optimize their marketing strategies, and improve overall campaign performance.
How to use UTM?
The first step of using UTM is to know the specifics of the reporting platform you use. Well, it is not very important because it will not affect the registered source and medium parameters but it is good to know/have. For example, the most used reporting platform, Google Analytics 4 (GA4), has its own default channel group. It basically groups the traffic depending on the source and medium.
GA4 has specific requirements to determine which group the session belongs to. For example, if the source matches a list of search sites(Google, Bing etc.) and medium cpc, paid or ppc, the session will be assigned to "Paid Search". If the UTM parameters are not defined according to GA4 default channel group requirements, the session may be misgrouped or grouped as unassigned. You can find the full list of GA4 default channel group specifications on Google's official support page "GA4 Default channel group".
The next step is building the link. Google has a tool just for this, Campaign URL Builder. The most important part here is the source and medium since they will be the deciding factor for the traffic source. The other parameters are used for detailed information about the traffic source. Let's say you have a special offer for valentine's day and you would like to promote it with a series of Meta posts. For your first post, the link with UTM would look like this: https://www.example.com?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social& utm_campaign=valentine&utm_content=special_offer_1. The same logic can be applied to all the links to be tracked.
Ad platforms like Google Ads have their own variables to help with building UTM. For example, {keyword} variable can be used to track search terms in applicable ads by adding it to the utm_term parameter like this utm_term = {keyword}. You can find more variables to be used in Google ads on Google's official support page "Set up tracking with ValueTrack parameters".