Businesses can’t afford not to track key metrics. Businesses track the profit margin of each product line and service and the return on investment for most projects. But are you tracking the success rate of your marketing campaigns? Are you determining the reach and return on the investment of your advertising spending? If not, you should be. Let’s learn how to create trackable links to measure your campaigns with Urchin Tracking Modules or UTM.
Create a Link
The first step is creating the URL for your content, if it doesn’t already exist. You’ll add the Urchin Tracking Module or UTM onto the end of that link at a later step. The UTM will be reviewed by Google Analytics to determine the sources of traffic and metrics like the click-through rate and the number of customers from each source.
Create the Campaign Source
You are going to track data by campaign. This could be promoted products, banners, cost per click ads, Tweets or social media posts. You need to create the campaign and name it before you can associate the URL with the campaign.
UTM sources are the sites within that channel. It could be Facebook, Medium, Bing, Twitter, Yahoo, or Google’s search engine results page. The UTM link will have a ? followed by UTM_Source=sourcename. For example, content from Google search results could be UTM_Source=Google. The question mark is placed between this source and the query string. You could also have a campaign for Google My Business like utm_campaign=gmb. That allows you to track the traffic coming in from the Google business directory.
The UTM parameter often includes a utm_medium=profile. This is a key-value pair that passes the medium. This isn’t going to appear in every UTM link. You can use the utm_content parameter to determine if humorous content or negative content is generating more traffic. However, the most important parameters are source, medium and campaign.
Create the UTM Link
There are two main ways to create UTM links. One is to use a spreadsheet. You’d paste the link repeatedly in the spreadsheet, create unique identifiers for each combination of factors, append them onto the link and then start sharing them. The downside to this approach is that you need to set rules for the structure of handmade UTMs and then make sure someone doesn’t duplicate a UTM. The alternative is to use an UTM code generator. You’ll get a unique UTM code that you can add to each page, and you avoid the hassle of managing naming conventions while avoiding the need to create custom landing pages for each marketing campaign. The next step is sharing the link per your digital marketing campaign.
Track Your Data
Log into the Google analytics page. Go to Acquisition, Campaign. This will allow you to see your UTM in action as well as any other referrals to your website.
You could get one that allows you to improve your SEO. For example, utm_term allows you to see the traffic resulting from keywords. These keywords could be anything from local search terms to your brand name.
