UTM – Updated – August 2020
When you are not following an effective lead generation strategy, it means your marketing strategy is incomplete. If you are getting a lot of leads through your website then you have to understand through which mode the users are landing on your site.
There are various types of lead generation techniques, maybe you are following all or most of them. You can learn all effective lead generation techniques here: https://www.quicksprout.com/2017/11/20/the-most-effective-ways-to-generate-leads-for-your-business/
When you get a new lead then you want to reapply that particular marketing strategy to get additional flow. But your marketing strategy may contain various types of campaigns, so you become unable to identify the source of your new lead.
There are two ways to solve this situation- either you make an assumption or you can take help from technology.
Once you become able to point out your most effective marketing campaign, you can focus the majority of your efforts on that particular strategy.
As every coin has two faces, you will also learn about those strategies that are not working for you at all. Thus, you can cut on your marketing costs by opting out those non-effective strategies.
So, the name of the technology that helps to point out all these things is UTM parameters.
If you are paying other websites to promote your page through banners, then creating the UTM parameters is crucial for making your campaign really effective.
Suppose your site or brand is being promoted on three different websites as a banner ad. Don’t you want to know which one is producing the best results?
Your answer must be a “Yes”, because increasing traffic and getting new leads is awesome. But why do you need to pay for three websites to promote your brand if 90-95% of the traffic is coming from a single website?
By analyzing your data coming from the UTM parameters, you can opt-out ineffective or less effective websites from your banner campaigns. This will save you money and increase efficiency with such types of promotions.
Set up UTM Parameters
To setup UTM code, you need to go to “Campaign URL Builder” from your Google Analytics menu, or click https://ga-dev-tools.appspot.com/campaign-url-builder/
There, you will get the instruction to create a custom weblink to track the inner details of your leads.
Google Analytics has five parameters that you can add to your customized URL:
- campaign source
- campaign medium
- campaign name
- campaign term
- campaign content
The source is used to recognize exactly where the link is going to be embedded. This could be something like a publication, an advertiser or another website.
Campaign medium category is used to differentiate the email newsletters, banners, or CPC campaigns.
The campaign name defines the name of your promotional campaign. You can put campaign-related terms in the “name”. For example, promotional code, SALE, limited time offers, product name, etc.
Campaign terms are for paid keyword promotions. You can include those words in this field.
Your campaign content parameter enables you to isolate similar links within the same promotion. For example, let’s say you have multiple CTA buttons within the same newsletter. Then, you will use this parameter to recognize and differentiate them.
UTM parameters and social media!
We all know that nowadays, social media is the largest platform for marketing, the place to create your community. However, we still hesitate a lot because the number of options is overwhelming. Which platform to choose? Where is my audience? Which platform is suitable for my business? What kind of content would work the best?
And, without proper answers, you decide to go out and try. However, as you appreciate your time, you want to use something to check if your strategy actually works.
UTM got you covered here. Using it, you will be able to see what platform drives you the most traffic, concentrate your time on the single source, and make it boom.
How to name UTM parameter?
Generally, it doesn’t matter what you write in the “text” field of every parameter. You can write any combination of alphabets; Google Analytics will definitely generate a working link to track the leads coming to your website.
But still, you are always advised to put the unique names to avoid your own confusion.
For example, if you have a link with “utm_source=email” and the second one as “utm_source=Email”, Google Analytics will take them as different sources, but you will get confused with these sources.
So, for the prosperity of your marketing strategies, always choose different names for the different campaigns and set up UTM codes properly.
For a basic introduction about google toolset, you can refer to our previous posts:
