UTMs are an important part of any marketing strategy. Attribution for links helps you know more about your marketing efforts—where customers are seeing your message and what makes them click.
But UTMs make long links even longer, creating a messy string of characters that take up precious space in social posts, emails, and anywhere else you share your content.
That’s why Bitly and UTMs are a match made in heaven—you get all of the data tracking from UTMs, but none of the added length in your URL. And, with our recent improvements to the link builder in Bitly, you can create more robust short links with UTM presets.
What are UTMs and URL parameters?
UTM stands for Urchin Tracking Module (Urchin was the predecessor of Google Analytics). UTM parameters (or UTM codes) are appended to a URL to help parse data in Google Analytics so that you can track specific information about a URL page visit. Essentially, UTMs help you dig deeper into a link’s access points without changing its destination.
There are five UTM parameters: source, medium, campaign, content, and term. The first three are mandatory when creating a UTM link, while the last two are optional.
If you need more flexibility, you want to look at creating custom URL parameters. These can be anything you need to fulfill your particular tracking goals—things like influencer IDs, customer IDs, or details about A/B testing.
To summarize, these parameters allow you to track more details about your link while still sending users to the same place.
What’s changed in Bitly
We have offered UTM creation in the Bitly link shortener for a few years (and you can always shorten a link with UTMs added outside of our platform). But with our latest improvements, you can do even more.
Save and store
UTMs are notoriously finicky—any opportunity to make using them easier is a win for marketers. Saving your most-used UTMs as presets helps to streamline workflows and improves Google Analytics reporting.
Plus, you can easily add or delete a UTM preset right in our link shortener and speed up link creation. Fewer tools also means a lower chance for user error and more consistent reporting.
Custom URL parameters
We added a custom URL parameter to the link builder (that also includes presets). Do you have a campaign that requires more niche tracking like customer IDs or influencer names? Bitly’s got you covered.
Custom URL parameters give greater visibility into trackable metrics outside the standard—offering more personalized insights that cater to your individual needs. Just remember that you will also have to set these up on the Google Analytics side so that they’re tracked properly.
This support article from Google has more information about adding URL parameters to Google Analytics.
Bulk shortening improvements
Finally, we made significant improvements to our bulk link shortener. Depending on your plan, shorten up to 100,000 links at once without needing to access the API or assistance from your developer team.
To access the bulk shortener page from the Bitly Dashboard, simply select Create new and then Link on the Bitly Dashboard. In the bottom-left corner, select bulk upload.
From there, you can download our bulk-shortening template (in CSV format) to easily start uploading the links you want to shorten. Add UTMs to your bulk list and quickly see how many more links you can shorten this month, then track those UTMs in your favorite website tracking platform.
Check out this article from our Help Center for more detailed instructions on how to shorten links in bulk with Bitly.
UTMs: Ultimate Tracking Momentum
With UTMs in Bitly, you get all the detailed data provided by long URLs while keeping them short and neat to use for your marketing materials. As a bonus, customizing and branding links validates their trustworthiness for your customers.
UTMs in the Bitly link builder are available on Growth plans and above. Visit our pricing page to find your perfect plan and unlock better link tracking today!
