How to Use UTM Tracking

If you're running any kind of marketing campaign on your website, then you need to know how it is performing. Your website host, whether Cloudways or another can't help you. There are tools, like Google Analytics and Google Search Console, that can help you. However, they’re not always good at giving you the exact campaign that has referred the traffic to your website when they’re left to their own tracking purposes.

To get around this, you can use UTM tracking.

What is UTM Tracking?

UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) is some text that can be added to a link that will tell Google Analytics and other tracking systems more about the referring website. For instance, you can include information such as the referring website, the exact campaign, the date of the campaign and more.

If you’re spending a lot of time on social media and publishing lots of links on social media, email marketing and blogging, then you need to know what campaigns are proving successful. By using UTMs, you can differentiate between campaigns and platforms with ease and this can help you make budgeting decisions.

For instance, if you send out a campaign with MailChimp but also advertise the same deal on Facebook and Twitter you can create three different UTMs that can be added to the end of the URL that you want customers to go to so you can see which one gets you the best amount of traffic.

You can also track based on the message or post that was published. For instance, if you send out three Facebook posts per day, then you can give each one a different UTM for you to track at what time customers are going to interact more with your content and therefore determine when the best time to publish sales content is on your Facebook page.

How to Create a UTM Tracking Code

You can use the tool on this website to create a UTM tracking code. It is free for all and you can use it as many times as you would like. For this tool to work you will need to add in some details which are here below:

Website URL – The location where you would like the visitor to land (i.e. product page, landing page, etc.).
Campaign Source – This is to identify the referring website for the traffic. This could be the social media platform, email marketing, a third-party website or another location.
Campaign Name – You can name the campaign. This is an optional aspect that can help you identify what campaign it is linked to.
Campaign Term – This is another optional term that allows you to identify whether there is a specific term you’ve used to attract audiences to your website.
Campaign Content – You can identify the type of media or content that has been used here to attract the audience. This can include banner, email, landing page, social media image, etc.

Once you’ve created the UTM, you can then connect this to your campaign and monitor the results as they come through.

Final Word: How to Use UTM Tracking

UTM Tracking is one of the most important aspects when you want to create good campaigns that you want to track the progress of campaigns. You’re able to distinguish between different campaigns, referral websites and even the exact content that has led that customer to your website. And you can create your UTM for free.