So often we see businesses invest significant time and money into digital marketing and advertising efforts with no mechanism to track clicks back to landing pages or websites.

UTM tags offer an easy way to track and learn more about what digital marketing medium, campaign, ad copy or creative is truly working the best. These tags are designed for analytics tools (Google Analytics and others) to collect data from your promoted page links.

Links with UTM tags look like this:

https://1dea.ca/goal-tracking-tags?utm_source=blog&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=post002

Versus a clean link:

https://1dea.ca/goal-tracking-tags

What can I use UTM tags for?

It’s worth adding tags to recurring or ongoing digital campaigns such as paid advertisements and sponsorships on trade publications or news websites, email marketing campaigns or Google My Business profile activity.

You can set up UTM codes for each ad group, ad versions, call-to-action buttons or ad creative. Tracking codes can provide a simple way to test the impact of your messaging and imagery on your audience. Answering questions like: Which ad copy brought in more traffic? What image led to more clicks? Which button was more effective?

Where do I find UTM data in Google Analytics?

As mentioned above, Google Analytics is designed to read UTM codes. You can see your information all in one place, organized, under Campaigns. Filter by the parameters you used (Source, Medium, Campaign) and you can see exactly how much traffic came from that particular link.

Setting up your UTM tags

There are 5 main UTM parameters that can be used:

utm_source= Tracks where your traffic is coming from.
Here you could put: google, facebook, affiliate-site (affiliate.com), email, etc.

utm_medium= How traffic is coming to you. It’s recommended to use this for the marketing medium, such as: cpc, social, newsletter, display.

utm_campaign= Identifies the campaign generating traffic. This tag is where you can get more detailed, using a particular campaign name, slogan, promo code or product.

utm_term= Identifies specific keywords targeted in paid campaigns (particularly outside of Google). This tag his helpful for analyzing ROI of specific paid keywords.

utm_content= Helps to track specific ads or links. For example, if you are testing different call-to-action buttons in a newsletter. You could use the term to differentiate between them. (utm_term=button vs. utm_term=textlink)

To make life easier

There are UTM builders available online where you fill out a form and a link is generated which you can copy and paste to your campaign.

For example, I am looking to create a UTM tag to track this post for when we share it on Facebook.

So, for that my:
utm_source = facebook

utm_medium = social (since it’s not paid)

utm_campaign = post002 (this a sequential code that I made for the blog post to keep them organized)

I hope that after reading this you feel more comfortable to start using tracking codes! If you’re still hesitant, or have any questions, please feel free to shoot us an email, or drop a note in the comments below.