Track Where Your Visitors Are Coming From Using UTM Parameters

Tracking your links is a vital step in succeeding online.

The question that often comes up is: “Where your website visitors (traffic being the industry term) come from?”

You might now know if but you post links…

• In a paid ad on social media
• In a description of a video, etc
• In a social media post
• In the profile section on social media
• In a comment

When you look at your website reporting tool (usually Google Analytics) if you don’t add “tracking codes” to your links data than you won’t be 100% sure.

Tracking Links

When you share something you find interesting or are trying to sell, you are usually doing this via a link. You might put that in an email, a text message or an ad.

What should you track?

1. Email campaigns
2. Social campaigns
3. Paid campaigns
4. Affiliate campaigns
5. Offline campaigns

What does tracking a link mean?

What most people don’t know is that we can add data to those links to see who is clicking, where they went on your website, if they bought a product and for how much.

To track a link, we can use UTM Parameters.

What does UTM stand for?

UTM stands for “Urchin Tracking Module.”

What does a UTM parameter link look like?

Here is a normal link that you might share: solveinterestingproblems.com

If we wanted to add UTM tracking to this link, it may look like: solveinterestingproblems.com?utm_medium=social

Putting utm_medium=social would help me understand that this was a link that I used on social media. More on this later…

What are the elements make up a UTM parameter

Source – to track a source, such as Facebook, you will use the utm_source parameter. Identify the source of the traffic. It could be a website, advertiser, etc. e.g. twitter, facebook, google

Medium – to track a medium like a cost per click platform you will use the utm_medium parameter. Identify the medium used by a visitor to come to your site, e.g. email, social, cpc.

Campaign Name – to track a campaign you will use the utm_campaign parameter. The name of the marketing effort, e.g. launch, 50percent_sale, etc.

Campaign Content – to track what the content of a link is you will use the utm_content parameter. Identify content or call to action, e.g. buy now, learn more, etc.

Campaign Term – to track a specific term that a link is a part of you will use the utm_term parameter. This is rarely used and if is then normally with Adwords.

Putting this all together, an example would look like:

http://www.example.com, then the final URL with UTM parameters might look like: http://www.example.com/?utm_campaign=launch&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social

This would tell me that the campaign was called launch and it had to do with people coming from social media (specifically Twitter).

Good Parameters Answer Questions

Campaign Name: What campaign is this?

Another question could be “Why am I targeting these sources and (optional) when?

Do:

• Add dates – for example adding a date to the campaign for your weekly email allows you to see how many people are still clicking through weeks or month after you sent the email. Suggestions: ‘newsletter-2013-week-23′, ’20pc-off-2013-sept-23’ or ‘sweepstakes-maldives’
• describe your overall marketing effort, e.g. summer_sale, beta_launch, etc. A good way to come with a campaign name is to write down why you are trying to get the word out. What are you trying to accomplish by this specific promotion?
• Unlike utm_medium and utm_source, there are no strict rules for campaign names. Agree on a single “Campaign name” across sources and try to stick with it
• Make your campaign names concise, yet intuitive and readable.

Don’t:

• Use campaign names like ‘blogpost’, ‘shoes’ or ‘revenue’.”

Medium: How was the URL displayed?

Do:

• Consider splitting out paid and organic for other channels so you can easily report on paid marketing effectiveness. One example would be using ‘sponsored’ for any promoted posts on Facebook instead of ‘post’. If you’re running display retargeting I’d also consider separating this because those users will behave completely differently to normal display users (and it’ll help with attribution).

Don’t:

• Use ‘cpc’ or ‘organic’ for anything other than search
• Get too specific with utm_medium. This parameter should give the context of the Ad placement and should be fairly high level, like the provided defaults: ‘cpc’ (paid search), ‘organic’ (organic search), ‘referral’ and ‘direct’. I often see examples like ‘utm_medium=banner300’ which is too specific or ‘utm_medium=paid’ which is much too broad.

Here are some examples:

• affiliate
• banner
• billboard
• cpc
• display
• display
• e-book
• email
• feed
• paid-email
• paid-social
• partners
• dedicated
• spacead
• print
• qr-code
• post (social)
• social
• widget
• video
• fb_ad

When choosing a “Medium”, follow the Default Channel Definitions or your own Custom Channel grouping. The biggest mistake we keep seeing is the mistagging of mediums. This is the most important tag to get right. How a site tags a medium will determine which bucket their data adds to in the reports.

For example: affiliate, partners, display, social, paid-email, paid-social

Source – Where was the URL clicked (source)?

Here are some examples:

• blog
• delicious
• digg
• facebook
• foursquare
• linkedin
• pinterest
• quora
• reddit
• stumbleupon
• tumblr
• twitter
• mailchimp
• klaviyo
• drip
• active-campaign

Content – What version of the content worked better, for example, a text link or a button (content)?

Let’s say you came up with two headlines for a blog article and you are not sure which one is better.

• 7 ways to save money this summer
• How to find great deals this summer

You can build two UTM tracking URLs to your blog article with each of these values for utm_content:

• utm_content=7_ways_to_save_money_this_summer
• utm_content=how_to_find_great_deals_this_summer

Here are some examples:

• video-ad
• text-ad
• blue-banner
• green-banner
• 7-ways-to-save-money-this-summer
• how-to-find-great-deals-this-summer
• download-ebook
• subscribe-now
• cta-top-banner
• cta-sidebar
• cta-bottom
• book-launch-2014-may-7
• new-admin-dashboard-2014-april

Term – What keyword is working?

Do:

• Use on paid search campaigns
• Short and simple

Don’t:

• Term is usually only used when you are running paid ads

That being said, here are some examples of how you can use the “term” parameter:

• subject line/date of email
• post date/subject
• 2019-09-17

Other Examples

In basic terms, if someone posts your link to a social page without tracking, it will list the network as a Referral. That means it is grouped under social.

What UTM Parameters to use in Social Campaigns?

Do use lowercase names for the social media networks lowercase:

• Delicious : delicious
• Digg : digg
• Facebook : facebook
• Foursquare : foursquare
• LinkedIn : linkedin
• Pinterest : pinterest
• Quora : quora
• Reddit : reddit
• StumbleUpon : stumbleupon
• Tumblr : tumblr
• Twitter : twitter

Facebook Paid

• Campaign Name: website
• Campaign Source: facebook
• Campaign Medium: paid-social

Facebook also allows you to add parameters automatically using the following link:

?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=paid-social&utm_campaign={{campaign.name}}&utm_content={{ad.name}}&utm_term={{adset.name}}&ad_id={{ad.id}}

Facebook Page Post

• Campaign Name: website
• Campaign Source: facebook
• Campaign Medium: pagepost

Facebook Promoted Post

• Campaign Name: website
• Campaign Source: facebook
• Campaign Medium: promotedpagepost

Facebook Post Within Group

• Campaign Name: website
• Campaign Source: facebook
• Campaign Medium: grouppost

Facebook Post Within Group

• Campaign Name: website
• Campaign Source: facebook
• Campaign Medium: profilepost

LinkedIn Contact Information

• Campaign Name: website
• Campaign Source: linkedin
• Campaign Medium: profilecontact

LinkedIn Projects

• Campaign Name: website
• Campaign Source: linkedin
• Campaign Medium: profileprojects

LinkedIn

• Campaign Name: content-adwords-ebook
• Source: linkedin
• Medium: social
• Term: adwords-strategies
• Content=adwords-ebook-200x400x

Twitter Profile Link

• Campaign Name: example
• Source: twitter
• Medium: profile

Twitter Link Within A Tweet

• Campaign Name: example
• Source: twitter
• Medium: tweet

Twitter Link Within a Promoted Tweet

• Campaign Name: example
• Source: twitter
• Medium: promoted

What UTM Parameters to use in for a Banner Ad on other Websites?

• Campaign Name: autumn-collection-2019
• Source: name-of-the-website-where-it-appears
• Medium: display
• Term: shoes

What UTM Parameters to use in for Printed Ads?

• Campaign Name: autumn-collection-2019
• Source: vogue
• Medium: offline
• Term: shoes

What UTM Parameters to use in for Email Campaigns?

Medium: email

Source:

Some people use mailchimp or sendgrid

You can also ask “how did someone join this mailing list?”

If someone joined your newsletter, utm_source is newsletter. If someone joined your email course, utm_source is course. If someone opted for emails through their account settings, utm_source could be settings or myaccount. Someone signing up for launch email has utm_source as launch.

Campaign Names

Weekly Newsletter

The simplest campaign name would be weekly. If you would like to know the performance for a particular week, you could use weekly-2014_06_24. It’s better to use yyyy_mm_dd format to allow meaningful sorting.

Drip email campaigns

If your drip email course is about How to get more leads, the campaign names would be

get_more_leads-1 for the first email
get_more_leads-2 for the second email
.. and so on

Monthly automated report

If your users get a report each month about their account, utm_campaign could be monthly_report.

UTM Content

utm_content=buy_now

utm_content=learn_more

UTM Term

This should not be used for email campaigns. It’s reserved for paid search campaigns.

What UTM Parameters to use in for an Email Signature?

• Campaign Name: employee-name
• Source: employee-signature
• Medium: email
• Content: logo

What UTM Parameters to use in for a Contest?

• Campaign Name: free-ipad-contest

What UTM Parameters to use in for a QR Code?

• Medium: qr

UTM parameter do’s and don’ts?

Mandatory parameters – source, medium, and campaign are mandatory

Be consistent – make sure that if you pick a naming convention you stick with it.

Don’t track internal links – UTM Parameters are only for clicks from external sources.

Don’t use spaces – there are two camps on what to replace a space with. Matt Cutts explains why here that he prefers using dashes over underscores to create a “space.” Other people think a + sign is better and you can read more here. Just pick one.

Do not use special characters like Ampersand & and question marks. Sa yes, S&A, no.

Use lowercase – stay consistent with lowercase throughout all of your campaigns. For example, utm_source=LinkedIn is different from utm_source=linkedin.

Trailing slash (/) before the question mark when tagging URLs (example.com? or example.com/?) – you can use either.

Google AdWords auto-tagging – You should allow manual tagging (UTM values) to override auto-tagging (GCLID values) if you’d like to mix manual and auto-tagging

Never be repeating yourself within your tags – It’s unnecessary, makes reports difficult to read and confuses people.
Don’t do what Twitter does: ‘https://twitter.com/2michaeltaylor/status/410873192593375232/photo/1/large?utm_source=fb&utm_medium=fb&utm_campaign=2michaeltaylor&utm_content=410873192593375232′” You should definitely avoid duplicating the information in utm_medium and utm_source. So twitter_promotion, social_outreach are not good names.

Don’t use ‘cpc’ or ‘organic’ for anything other than search, but you should consider splitting out paid and organic for other channels so you can easily report on paid marketing effectiveness. One example would be using ‘sponsored’ for any promoted posts on Facebook instead of ‘post’. If you’re running display retargeting I’d also consider separating this, because those users will behave completely differently to normal display users (and it’ll help with attribution).

The order doesn’t matter – No specific order is required for the Source, Medium, Campaign, or other query parameters. You should use a question mark (?) before the first query parameter and then separate all other query parameters with ampersands (&).

Visitors from your blog should not be tracked using UTM Parameters.

Using the # parameter – if the website CMS uses question marks to show specific content (for example store.com/?category=furniture&product=chair), you cannot add &utm_source=… to the URL because it would prevent the CMS from finding the page. In that case, if you’re running Universal Analytics on your site, you can use the anchor character (#) instead of the ampersand (&), and it works well by default. For example: store.com/?category=furniture&product=chair#utm_source=…&utm_medium=…&utm_campaign=…

Referral or Direct Links

Whenever a visitor comes to your website, Google Analytics will record where that person came from. Without tracking codes Google Analytics will tag that person as a “referral.”

Google Analytics will also record someone as “direct traffic” for the following reasons:

• A visitor coming from a bookmarked URL
• Manually typing URL in the browser
• HTTPS to HTTP links
• Mobile apps
• Email clients
• Instant messengers
• Twitter clients
• Links in documents like PDF, MS Word, Powerpoint, etc.
• and many other reasons

Tools for building links

• Google’s Official Campaign URL Builder
• Quickwin.io Chrome Extension
• UTM.io Chrome Extension
• Raven Tools and Raven’s URL builder.
• You can use this automated Google Spreadsheet – This document will simplify your workflow while staying organized at the same time.
• You can use an automated Google Spreadsheet built by Annie.
• You can use this UTM builder tool (Lars, thanks for sharing!)

Further Reading and References

• https://effinamazing.com/tools/utm-tracking-code-builder/
• https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/what-are-utm-tracking-codes-ht
• https://raventools.com/marketing-reports/google-analytics/url-builder/
• https://neilpatel.com/blog/the-ultimate-guide-to-using-utm-parameters/
• https://www.terminusapp.com/blog/utm-parameters-best-practices/
• https://adespresso.com/blog/utm-parameters-guide/
• https://www.bizible.com/blog/best-practices-utm-parameters-tagging-urls
• https://holini.com/utm-parameters/
• https://effinamazing.com/blog/dummies-guide-utm-tracking/
• https://medium.com/on-digital-marketing/advanced-utm-tracking-b15bd3c4670c
• https://www.degordian.com/education/blog/5-cool-examples-of-utm-tracking/
• rebrandly.com
• bitly.com
• clicktool.com
• https://raventools.com/marketing-reports/google-analytics/event-tracking/