Before you make a purchase, what’s one of the first actions you take? Do you read the reviews online, check social media, or maybe do a price comparison? If there’s anything that you can guarantee a customer will do, it’s research before pulling out their wallet.
Understanding your customer’s journey online is key to generating sales. Placing UTM codes in your URL can help you understand where your web traffic comes from. Analytics tools like HubSpot and Google Analytics use UTM parameters to determine where your web traffic comes from.
Read on to learn more about UTM parameters and how to use them in your digital marketing strategy.
What are UTM parameters?
UTM parameters of codes are components of a URL that reveal the nature of visitors who come to your site.
An example is bitly.com/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=utm-best-practices&utm_content=utms-best-practices-blog
The highlighted components are UTM parameters, which track where your visitors come from. Analytics tools will help you interpret this information—in this case, it can tell you how many visitors came from your email newsletter.
Now-defunct software company Urchin developed the Urchin Tracking Module, which became the UTM tracking parameters we know today. Google acquired Urchin in 2005 as the foundational framework for Google Analytics.
Types of UTM parameters
There are several different types of UTM parameters. Sites use these to track visitor referrals from different marketing channels, such as other websites, social media, email marketing, and more.
Source
The utm_source tag identifies the source of your web traffic, such as a search engine, social network, or other website. Let’s say a recent Buzzfeed article mentions your brand. You could use the tag utm_source=buzzfeed to track traffic from that article to your site.
Medium
The utm_medium tag identifies the digital medium that your traffic is coming from, such as social media, a PPC ad campaign, or an email campaign. For example, if you’ve launched a cost-per-click Google Ads campaign to drive traffic to your site, the tag utm_medium=CPC will track the traffic.
Campaign name
The utm_campaign tag is used to track web traffic from specific advertising campaigns. You can customize this based on the theme of the campaign. For example, if you’re launching a campaign to promote a new product, your UTM parameter tag might be utm_campaign=productname.
Content
The utm_content tag tracks web traffic from specific call-to-action buttons throughout your campaign. This tag is used in addition to source, medium, and campaign tags.
This is helpful for web pages or email newsletters containing multiple CTA buttons, so you can determine which drives more traffic. For example, if you have a CTA button that says “Sign Up Now,” your tag might say utm_content=signupnow.
Term
The utm_term tag tracks web traffic from specific web search terms. Like the content tag, the term tag is used in conjunction with source, medium, and campaign tags. This tag works well for monitoring your paid ad campaigns from Google. If someone comes to your site by searching for “link shorteners,” the tag would read utm_term=link%shorteners.
Importance of UTM parameters
UTM parameters serve an important purpose in your marketing campaigns. These UTM codes track the performance of each link to help you understand where traffic originates.
They integrate directly with your marketing analytics tools, providing data that is easy to read and interpret. This gives you plenty of helpful data about your audience and their online behavior—which you can use to optimize your campaigns.
For example, your UTM parameters can tell you how much of your web traffic comes from social media, email marketing, or PPC campaigns. You can also see how much of this traffic leads to a purchase, which allows you to calculate conversion rates.
This valuable information will help you determine where to focus your marketing budget for the best return on investment (ROI).
For example, if most of your traffic comes from Instagram, you’ll know to increase your investment in your social media strategy. You’ll also be able to identify underperforming marketing campaigns and take steps to correct them.
Since UTM parameters are very granular, you can even use them to determine which words and phrases are most effective in your campaign. For example, you can use UTM parameters to conduct A/B testing for multiple calls-to-action to see which ones are most effective.
How to use UTM parameters
Some of the most successful businesses in the world use UTMs, and there are many different ways to implement these tags in your own URLs, including:
Tracking traffic sources
UTM parameters are one of the most efficient ways to determine where your web traffic is coming from. This will help you better understand your audience’s behavior and use it to inform your marketing strategies.
You may be surprised where your web traffic comes from, especially as consumer trends change. For example, even a small email newsletter could lead to significant web traffic if you target the right audience.
Mentions in popular media outlets can also drive traffic to your site. UTM parameters will identify these sources of interest to help you better understand and manage your online traffic.
The popularity of social media platforms also ebbs and flows as new features are released and communication trends change. Tracking your website traffic can help you stay up-to-date with the latest social trends and adjust your marketing efforts accordingly.
Measuring campaign performance
When you launch a new marketing campaign, you’ll need an easy way to see its performance. You’ll also need a way to determine how different marketing campaigns stack up against each other and generate the most traffic.
Metrics like social media likes or email open rates only tell how many people engage with your marketing assets. These metrics don’t tell you how many viewers eventually visit your website or make a purchase.
UTM parameters track your complete customer journey online, from seeing your marketing assets to visiting your website to making a purchase. This will help you determine if a specific campaign is effective or not and adjust your strategies accordingly.
Optimizing ad placements
There are many ways to advertise online, but not every ad will have the same impact. People respond better to some ads than others, depending on where they’re placed online. For example, there are some cases where a pop-up ad may be more effective than a display ad or vice versa.
UTM parameters will tell you exactly how many website visits came from each ad. With this information, you’ll learn which ad placements are most effective. You can also avoid spending money on ineffective ad placements in the future.
Analyzing social media
Social media has become an essential part of modern marketing. It’s one of the best ways to communicate with your audience directly and stay on the pulse of your industry.
However, social media also changes rapidly, and it can be difficult to determine which strategies are most effective. This is where UTM parameters come in—you can use them to identify which social media platforms drive the most conversions.
In particular, this can help you determine which social media platforms resonate most with your audience. Most consumers have distinct preferences when it comes to the social media platforms they frequent. Data from your UTM parameters can help you determine which platforms will be most effective for your brand.
For example, B2B brands often get the most traction on LinkedIn, while B2C brands catering to a younger audience may generate more web traffic from TikTok and Instagram.
Additionally, UTM parameters can tell you which individual posts are most successful. For example, you might find that short-form video content, infographics, or photo stories are most effective, depending on your audience.
Conducting A/B testing
A/B testing is the process of showing two different marketing assets to different customer groups and comparing their performance. It’s a great way to test marketing concepts before launching them on a broader scale, and it generates real results: On average, firms that use A/B testing have approximately 10% more weekly page views.
UTM parameters are a very effective way to A/B test many different aspects of your marketing. For example, you might test two different CTA buttons on your site to see which generates more traffic. You could also A/B test Google PPC ads for different keywords to refine your SEO strategy.
This strategy works for many different types of ads and campaigns and will help you collect more granular data on your consumer preferences.
Best practices when using UTMs for URL tagging
When putting together your UTM links, it’s important to be strategic. These best practices will help you gather your web traffic data efficiently.
Use a simple and consistent naming convention
Long and detailed UTM codes are difficult to manage and trace, so keep your codes simple. The names of each UTM parameter should be specific and straightforward. This is particularly important if you have a team managing your URLs, as it will prevent confusion. Ideally, each UTM parameter should be easily identifiable just from its name.
Naming conventions should also be consistent across your company. For example, all UTMs associated with your social media links should have the value utm_medium=social. If you use both “social_media” and “social,” you’ll have two distinct line items in your performance reports, which can be confusing.
Finally, use underscores or dashes in your UTMs rather than using spaces. Spaces may disrupt your URL, causing it not to work.
Apply short URLs
Once you’ve developed a URL with properly tagged UTM parameters, it is time to shorten your links to make them visually appealing and memorable. Shorter links are easier to share with your audience, particularly when you’re working with a limited number of characters on social media.
To do this, use a URL-shortening tool like Bitly. Bitly creates a shorter URL that redirects to your longer target site. With Bitly, you can also create custom branded links for more consistency and visibility.
Eliminate redundancies
Keep your URL lengths manageable by avoiding repetition in the tags. For instance, a utm_campaign by the name this_is_year_2024 is redundant. Instead, just say year_2024.
Also, avoid using the same name in two UTM tags. This will skew your data, marking web traffic from two different places with the same name. Using the same name twice will quickly become confusing for your entire team.
This is particularly important for differentiating between campaigns with similar names. For example, if you launch a holiday marketing campaign each year, use different tags to ensure your data is accurate. If you’re struggling to create URLs, use Google’s Campaign URL Builder tool to preview your options before implementing them.
Track your URLs using a spreadsheet
The best way to avoid redundancies in your UTM codes is to track your site’s URLs in a spreadsheet. Your entire team will have access to your links, making it easier to stick to your naming conventions and avoid errors. Keep URLs organized by campaign for easy management.
Use lowercase letters
Tools like Google Analytics are case-sensitive. This means you should write your URLs entirely in lowercase letters. Using lowercase and uppercase letters interchangeably will result in two different UTM parameters, causing confusion among your team.
What to avoid when using UTMs for URL tagging
Ready to set up UTM codes for powerful tagging? Here are a few common pitfalls to avoid so you get the most accurate marketing data.
UTMs for organic traffic or internal links
You don’t need to use UTMs for your internal links. This is because your website platform will automatically track traffic between pages internally. Once someone reaches your website, you can watch their journey from page to page without UTMs. In fact, internal use of UTMs could lead to tracking errors.
It’s also important to note that UTMs don’t affect your organic search traffic or SEO rankings. Google Analytics will automatically track your organic search traffic, making it easier to manage.
Complicated language
Overly complex language quickly makes your UTMs confusing to manage, especially if you’re tracking multiple campaigns at once. Keep each UTM tag short and relevant to the campaign or source at hand. Avoid using strings of numbers or letters, and try to keep each parameter to just a few words long.
Simple language will make your data much easier to interpret within your analytics software. This also ensures that your entire team marketing team can read and manage UTM data without confusion.
Create your own UTM parameters with Bitly
UTM parameters are essential for tracking your customers’ entire journey, from initial brand awareness through to their final purchase. UTM parameters can make your site’s links long and clunky—but you can shorten them using Bitly.
Bitly is a powerful platform that transforms long tracking URLs into short, branded links to enhance your marketing efforts. Bitly also offers detailed analytics to track each link’s performance in a comprehensive, user-friendly Dashboard.
Get started with Bitly today to build trackable links that convert.