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How to setup UTMs to understand what marketing is driving site traffic

Updated: Jun 14, 2021




The quality of your analytics reports depends on the proper steps being taken in the setup. As the old adage goes "garbage in" = "garbage out". This will help you understand why the Marketing Ops team and Web team asks Campaign Marketers to ensure they have tracking on links. Usually, they mean make sure the links used in marketing material have the right UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) parameters.


Let's break these down as they are really simple. We are all familiar with URLs (uniform resource locator). They are just locations of web pages and within the URL we can append additional values for additional processing on the page (query strings). A special group/use of query strings are the UTMs. These are pairs of parameter/value combinations. If the page doesn't know what to do with them they are just ignored. For our marketing web pages, we definitely want our web analytics to use these as well as our forms to collect these for tracking.


Their simplicity is both a blessing and a danger. These are just bits of text and there no/few hard rules on usage. You will find this varies from company to company... to ensure these don't devolve into an unusable mess, it's important to adopt and document approved parameters and values. Here is a sample framework for using UTM values. Always use lower characters so those types of variations don't mess up your tracking and reporting.

(What UTM values do you use? share them with users in the comments)


You start with a link that looks like this:

https://acmemarketing.io/post/difference-between-leader-and-management


Then it looks like this with the UTM values for tracking and reporting:

https://acmemarketing.io/post/difference-between-leader-and-management?utm_campaign=10-ways-improve-your-social-marketing&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter


As you can imagine keeping track of all of these manually can be a headache. Many people use a spreadsheet to start. You can also leverage link-building tools to ensure consistency. One such tool is utm.io see it and other free tools on the Tools page.

(Share your favorite tool for utm management in the comments section)


If you want a little bit of history or another person's take on using utms, here is another great article at Search Engine Journal.




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