What are UTM Codes?

What Are UTM Codes?

As a business owner and marketer, you should know how to measure the success of your campaign. Twitter may be helping you generate traffic to your site, but can you tell which specific tweets are generating leads? Thanks to UTM codes, you can answer questions like these. Here are some things to know what UTM codes are, how you can create them, and how using UTM codes can help track your campaign’s success.

Learning About UTM Codes

Also known as UTM parameters, Urchin Traffic Monitor (UTM) codes are snippets of simple text that you can attach to the end of a URL. Once a user clicks a link to this URL, you can monitor the source of website traffic.

A typical UTM code would have this format: https://yourwebsite.com/your-post-title/?utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=blogpost. The UTM code is after the question mark. You can track different parameters, including the source, campaign, content, term, and medium.

These snippets of text, or code, after the question mark do not have any effect on the page. They only allow your analytics tool to monitor the source of the visitor.

5 Things You Can Track With UTM Codes

Using UTM codes can help you track the success of your campaign through different parameters: source, medium, campaign name, content, and term. You can use two or all of these UTM parameters depending on your goals. This allows you to see how effective guest post referral traffic is, which internal links visitors are clicking on your blog posts, and how the same content is performing across different marketing channels.

Source

This parameter lets you monitor the origin of the traffic. This could be from Facebook, Twitter, Google, or an email list name. It appears as utm_source. An example would be utm_source=Facebook. You can add this sample UTM code to the links you post to your Facebook page.

Medium

With this UTM parameter, you know the type of traffic that the visitor originated from. This could be social, email, Cost Per Click (CPC), or referral. An example of this is utm_medium=email.

Campaign Name

This campaign parameter lets you group everything from a specific campaign in your analytics tool so that you can monitor the performance of that particular campaign. It is also beneficial when doing reporting for your campaigns. The UTM code for this looks like this: utm_campaign=50%off.

Content

You can use this tracking tag if you have several links pointing to the same destination or URL, like having two call to action (CTA) buttons within one email. An example would be utm_content=headline and utm_content=image.?

Term

Used for paid search ads, this parameter lets you track your keywords. For example if you want to rank for the “digital marketing strategies” keyword, you can add a UTM code like this: utm_term=digital+marketing+strategies.

Creating UTM Codes in Google Analytics

You can easily build UTM codes in Google Analytics by following these steps:

●?Open Google Analytics Campaign URL Builder.?

●?Supply the needed information in the form. This includes the website URL, campaign source, campaign medium, campaign name, campaign term, and campaign content.

●?Measure the success of your campaign. Tracking incoming campaigns will be automatic if Google Analytics is already set up for your site. Simply go to Audience, Sources, and then Campaigns.

UTM Codes: The Key to Tracking Your Campaign’s Success

The use of UTM codes is a beneficial way to measure the success of your campaign. With different parameters, like source, medium, campaign name, term, and content, you can track the overall performance of a specific campaign, how well it's doing in different channels, and more. Simply follow the steps above to add UTM codes to your analytics tool kit. Visit our page so we can help you address your marketing needs!