What is a UTM and why you need to use them with all of your marketing campaigns

CVR, CPL, ROI – when it comes to marketing we love acronyms, so don’t feel embarrassed if you’ve never heard of a UTM before. If you’re an individual who loves to calculate return on investment from your marketing, a UTM is about to become your new best friend. Keep reading to learn why you need UTMs to make more strategic marketing decisions!

UTM 101

UTM stands for Urchin Tracking Module, and it’s a piece of software that Google acquired in 2005 in order to make monitoring marketer’s campaign traffic easier. A UTM requires four key components in order to be built:

1. Website URL: this can be your home page, or any other page on your website that you want to monitor traffic to

2. Campaign Source: where you’re getting your traffic from. For example, if you want to measure how many people are coming to your page from a partner link, like a Chamber of Commerce, you would write that information here

3. Campaign Medium: the physical channel in which the consumer clicked to get to your site (think email, social tile, etc.)

4. Campaign Name: the unique name you want to assign to this tracking code so you can recognize it later – like Summer2022Promo

The resulting UTM code you make will be long and complex, so these are links that you want to embed into something else so people don’t get afraid to click your link (hyperlinks are great – or links embedded in images).

Remember: a UTM is only useful if you have a Google Analytics account set up for your website – so if you don’t have one set up already, go do that first (fun fact: we at Achanted Communications are Google Analytics certified – so if you’re feeling lost, contact us to get one set up)

Why you should use them

There’s a philosophical argument when it comes to marketing: is marketing just an expense account, or does it actually bring value to your business? That’s why we marketers are consistently trying to measure our campaigns with hard data to prove our worth to accounting teams. As Peter Drucker said, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”

Take for example, an influencer campaign you want to run for your business. You’ve found your local expert in all things small business, and they’ve agreed to promote your business with a link to your website. While you can certainly see from your website’s traffic whether there was an increase in attendance, you can’t really tell which of those individuals came from that campaign in order to determine if it was a success or not. By using a UTM, you are able to know exactly where the individual came from, what pages they went to on your site, and whether that visit turned into a conversion (i.e.: MONEY).

How to make a UTM

Making a UTM for your marketing is actually very easy – you don’t need to know how to code in order to get one set up. Our favorite online UTM builder is by Google Analytics, which you can access here. But let’s run through an example together:

I’m running a campaign to see how many of visitors from an event I sponsored came to my website from the event website – so I’m going to keep that information in mind when I build my UTM:

1. Website URL: https://www.achanted.com/

2. Campaign Source: theoperahouse (we prefer to make things one word, all lowercase – just because it looks nicer!)

3. Campaign Medium: eventsponsorship

4. Campaign Name: operaartlive

The resulting URL is https://www.achanted.com/?utm_source=theoperahouse&utm_medium=eventsponsorship, which I’ll give to the event organizer to link with my logo. Now I can easily see how many leads I got from the event!

Tracking UTM in your Google Analytics

Once you campaign has ended, you’ll want to know how well you performed. There are two ways to find your UTM:

• Via Acquisition: Start by logging in to your website’s Google Analytics, and going to Source/Medium under the Acquisition panel on the left hand side of the screen. Then click ‘Campaigns,’ then ‘All Campaigns.’ You’ll then find your Campaign name (like operaartlive) listed, with all of your campaign stats

• Via Behavior: Rather than clicking the Acquisition panel, click Behavior instead. Then click ‘Site Content,’ then “All Pages.” You can sort and filter all of your pages to see how they rank with each other by typing your UTM into the search console above the page stats.
  

Note that once you’ve found your UTM on your Google Analytics, you can also filter the date to see how much traffic came to your website before, during, and after the campaign. This is great to see how long the residual effect of the campaign had on your website traffic.

Building and tracking a UTM can be a bit of a process, but the results far outweigh the setup pains. UTMs not only help you understand where your website traffic is coming from, but it can also make sure you’re using your marketing dollars wisely so you don’t keep sinking money into a channel that doesn’t bring any profit. Most consulting marketers want to make sure you get the most bang for your buck – so if you’re feeling confused, or need advice on how to run your next marketing campaign, be sure to give me a call!