Jay LeonardGoogle Analytics is good at tracking referrals and traffic sources, but in some cases the data can be a little general and doesn’t get as deep as you would like. As a digital marketing consultant, I get a lot of clients asking how they can understand their traffic a little more and see which links and campaigns are brining the greatest revenue to their business. If you are looking to test specific links, traffic sources, adverts or other A/B testing with links either on your own site or others, you can use UTM codes to give you much more detailed data on the link and its context.
UTM codes add a little bit of tracking code at the end of URLs that look something like:
Your visitors wont notice the difference, but it gives you or your marketing team a whole new insight into who your customers are, what marketing is working and what your visitors are doing on your website.
The principle of the UTM code is simple:
URL – The address of the website for the link
UTM Source – Where the link came from or is hosted, search engine, blog, email, whatever
UTM Medium – What time of link this was, e.g. an image, a text link, a social media post
UTM Campaign – The name you want to give this link for your own records and to hep you see which campaigns work the best
This allows you to understand what links are bringing the most traffic, bringing the highest conversions and working the hardest.
Making a code is very easy and Google have a great UTM builder to get you started.
So when rolling out your next email or marketing campaign, spend a moment to think how you can use UTM codes to seriously track and analyse the impact your campaign made.
Google Analytics is already set up to track and understand your UTM codes and can read all of the ?’s in your URL. Simply log into Google Analytics and click on
Traffic Sources > Sources > Campaigns
Here, all of your campaigns are listed with a load of other data that makes for some interesting reading into how you visitors actually engaged with your campaign.
I don’t want to get into the finer details of Google Analytics, but enough to say that although this data may seem baffling and over the top, it helps define the difference between visits and engaged, potential customers.
As we can see in example A, there were 262 visits from the link, but the bounce rate was just under 30%, which makes for around 184 engaged visitors. Therefore the link was successful but perhaps the landing page could need a little work. However, we can see that these visitors spent an average of 5 minutes on the site and viewed 7 pages.
All of this data is just the beginning of the advantages of UTM codes. This can be taken a little further for eCommerce sites, and see the revenue generated by each campaign. Again, in example A, this camoign generated £93.90 in revenue for the eCommerce website. Hence, UTM codes are very powerful for highlighting the ROI with email and social media.
So, for a quick 1 minute fix your marketing team have access to a wealth of data that can make your future campaigns more optimised and powerful to really hit those conversions.
Try and test this for yourself and always, pop me an email if you have any questions or issues.
This article was written for Business 2 Community by Jay Leonard.
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Hi Daniel,
Are there any conventions you recommend for the UTM tags?
Best,
Puru
Hi Puru
I would recommend that you make your UTM Codes are clear to you as possible. Make sure that you get as much information as possible such as where it came from, why kind of link it was etc.
If you have time, try and test different links with different UTM codes to see which links work best in your content.
I hope that helps!
All the best,
Daniel Reed
Hi Daniel,
Thanks for your answer. Do you also use Google URL Builder consistently for all the tracking needs? The reason I ask is because I am building an app (http://term.li/17VavXY) that will help people create UTM tagged urls and would like some feedback.
I am not officially “launched” yet, but you can access the app at http://app.terminusapp.com. It’s still under development, but please let me know what you think and how it can be improved.
Thanks,
Puru
Founder – Terminus