Track your campaigns using UTMs in Google Analytics

This post talks about UTMs and how we can utilise them with URLs to track specifics such as our online campaigns.

Once we have implemented Google Analytics for the first time Google will give us some understanding of where and how traffic gets to our site. For example, we could determine traffic arriving through Paid Search coming from google.

Where this default tracking falls short is when we would like to know specifically which campaigns are performing well, this is where UTMs come in. Put simply, UTMs allows us to break down traffic that’s usually only reported by its source and attribute to individual emails or paid search campaigns that you’re running.

What are UTMs?

“UTM” stands for “Urchin tracking module”. The codes are appended to the end of URLs and tells Google Analytics additional information about the link and campaign it relates to.

We have 5 UTM parameters at our disposal, 3 of which are mandatory (Source, Medium, and Name):

- Campaign Source (utm_source) – Required. This is usually the search engine or platform that you’re running the ads on (Google, Bing, Facebook, Twitter, Website, etc)

- Campaign Medium (utm_medium) – Required. This is used to state the type of advertising campaign that’s using the URL (CPC, PPC, email, etc).

- Campaign Name (utm_campaign) – Required. This field is used to insert the name of your campaign.

- Campaign Term (utm_term) – Used for paid search, we use this to note keywords for the ad.

- Campaign Content (utm_content) – Used for A/B testing and content-targeted ads. Use this to differentiate ads or links that point to the same URL.

https:/www.example.com/?

utm_source=blog&utm_medium=free-download&utm_campaign=MyFirstCampaign

In the example above, the string after the ? denotes the UTM code. We can see we have a source of “blog”, and medium of “free-download” and the campaign name is “MyFirstCampaign”.

Why use UTMs?

As mentioned earlier, UTMs allow us to identify traffic which is coming specifically from a email or ad campaign. Using this knowledge, we can prove the value of online campaigns.

For example, you can use UTM variables on social media to track how much traffic you receive from each post you publish.

How to implement UTMs in your URL Tagging

There are a few different ways you can setup your UTM code:

- Automatic URL Tagging

- Manual URL Tagging

Automatic URL Tagging

Plenty of third party advertising tools allow you to tag URLs using UTM code (Google Adwords, Mailchimp, Buffer, Hootsuite etc).

Considering how useful UTM parameters are, the default tends to be that auto-tracking is enabled.

Manual URL Tagging

The third party advertising tools allow you to automatically tag URLs for ads controlled by that tool. However, for links used in campaigns conducted outside of third party software, it will be necessary to consider manual URL tagging. Furthermore, you will often need to be a paid subscriber to have the auto-tagging functionality, so for marketers with a tighter budget, manual URL tagging might be best.

For manual URL tagging we can make use of UTM generators, some of the most popular ones being:

- Google’s URL Builder

- The Excel URL Builder

- Effin Amazing’s Chrome extension

Where to find URL Data in Google Analytics

Now that you understand the importance of UTM parameters and can implement them on your online campaigns, you will want to find those parameters in Google Analytics. This information can be found at Reporting > Acquisition > All Campaigns.

Note, any campaigns which haven’t been clicked will not show in Google Analytics.

Best Practices

Parameters naming:

Using consistent naming conventions if you opt for manual tagging so that your results are easy to interpret in Google Analytics. Tagging URLs this way mean that you can breakdown campaign reports and filter.

It is also recommendable to use descriptive tags for the utm_campaign parameter, so that you can quickly recognise which campaign is which. For example, “Autumn Promotion 19” is much easier to interpret than “8daa6cfb68-NEWFEB2013_RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN”.

Tagged URL Appearance:

By using UTM code in your URLs, the URLs will become long and rather unattractive to look at for users. However, we can apply some HTML code to resolve this:

_gaq.push(function() {

window.history.pushState(”,”, ‘click_here‘);

});

This way, Google Analytics will still receive the additional information about the campaigns but the users can click on an attractive link such as “click here”.