#utm parameters

As digital marketers, one of the biggest challenges we face is demonstrating the return on investment (ROI) of our marketing efforts. Whether you're running a paid advertising campaign, posting on social media, or sending out newsletters, understanding which channels are driving the most value is crucial for improving your marketing strategy and making data-driven decisions. That's where UTM parameters come in.

What Are UTM Parameters?

UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) parameters are tags you add to the end of URLs to track the performance of your marketing campaigns. They allow you to see exactly where your traffic is coming from, what source is sending visitors to your site, and how well specific campaigns are performing. These little snippets of code can provide you with powerful insights into your marketing efforts, making them indispensable when it comes to tracking ROI.

Here’s a quick rundown of the five standard UTM parameters:

utm_source – Identifies where the traffic is coming from (e.g., Google, Facebook, newsletter).

utm_medium – Specifies the marketing medium used (e.g., email, CPC, social).

utm_campaign – Tracks the specific campaign or promotion (e.g., winter-sale, product-launch).

utm_term – Used for tracking paid search keywords (e.g., shoes, running sneakers).

utm_content – Differentiates between different content or links within the same campaign (e.g., banner-1, text-link).

When used correctly, UTM parameters help you see exactly where your audience is coming from and how they are interacting with your content.

Why UTM Parameters Are Key to Tracking Marketing ROI

Now that we know what UTM parameters are, let’s dive into how they help track ROI. ROI is all about understanding how much revenue you’re earning compared to what you’re spending. To effectively measure that, you need to know which efforts are bringing in the most conversions. Here’s how UTM parameters provide that clarity:

1. Precise Campaign Performance Insights

UTM parameters allow you to track specific campaigns across multiple marketing channels. For example, if you're running a Facebook ad campaign and an email campaign at the same time, adding unique UTM parameters to the links in each campaign lets you compare how much traffic and conversions each one is driving. Without UTM parameters, you might struggle to determine which campaign is really generating sales or engagement.

By segmenting your campaigns with parameters like utm_source and utm_campaign, you can pinpoint which efforts are delivering the best results and optimize accordingly. For example:

utm_source=facebook

utm_campaign=winter-sale

If the winter sale campaign on Facebook results in high conversions, you’ll know that increasing your ad spend there could lead to more sales.

2. Attribution Across Multiple Touchpoints

In today’s multi-channel marketing world, customers often interact with a brand multiple times before making a purchase. For example, someone might click on your Instagram ad, then visit your website via an email campaign, and finally purchase after reading a blog post. With UTM parameters, you can track these touchpoints and assign the correct attribution for each. This helps you understand which channels and interactions lead to conversions, and ultimately, which channels are delivering the highest ROI.

If you see that your Facebook ads and Google search campaigns both drive significant traffic, but only one is converting visitors into paying customers, you can reallocate your resources toward the higher-converting channel, maximizing ROI.

3. Efficient Budget Allocation

Once you start collecting data from UTM-tracked campaigns, you can quickly identify which channels are the most profitable and which ones need refinement. Let’s say you’re running both paid Google search ads and organic social media posts. By tracking the performance of each using UTM parameters, you may find that your Google ads are generating conversions at a lower cost per acquisition (CPA) than your social media posts. This insight allows you to reallocate budget from social media ads to Google ads, optimizing your ROI.

4. Easier Performance Comparison

Without UTM parameters, comparing different marketing channels would require complicated, imprecise methods like manually tracking clicks or reviewing generic traffic data in analytics platforms. UTM parameters streamline the process by providing clear, actionable insights that allow for easy comparisons between channels. You can assess the performance of different mediums (email vs. paid ads), campaigns (holiday sale vs. product launch), or even specific content (landing page vs. blog post) to understand what’s working best.

5. Improved Conversion Tracking

By adding UTM parameters to every link you distribute, whether it’s in a paid ad, email newsletter, or social media post, you can track how many visitors those links bring to your site and how many of them convert. This is especially useful when combined with your website’s conversion tracking tools (like Google Analytics or your CRM platform). With this combined data, you’ll be able to measure exactly how much revenue each UTM-tagged campaign is generating, and assess whether those conversions justify the marketing spend.

For instance, let’s say you launch a product-specific campaign across several channels, and the utm_campaign for this launch is consistent across all your platforms. By tracking conversions from those links, you can measure how many customers came from your email campaign, Facebook, Instagram, or Google Ads, and see which channel is giving you the best return.

Best Practices for Using UTM Parameters to Track Marketing ROI

To maximize the effectiveness of your UTM parameters in tracking ROI, consider these best practices:

Be Consistent with Naming Conventions: Consistency is key in ensuring your data is organized and easy to analyze. Stick to a clear, organized naming system for your campaigns, sources, and mediums.

Use UTM Parameters for Every Link: Whether it's an email, blog post, or paid ad, always append UTM parameters to your URLs to track where your traffic is coming from and how it converts.

Integrate with Analytics Tools: Combine UTM data with tools like Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, or CRM platforms to track conversions and set up goals.

Focus on Key Metrics: ROI is not just about clicks; make sure you track conversions, customer lifetime value (CLV), and overall revenue generated from your campaigns.

Conclusion

UTM parameters are a simple but powerful tool for tracking marketing ROI. By providing deep insights into the performance of your campaigns, sources, and mediums, they help you understand where to allocate your marketing budget to get the highest return. With the data-driven insights UTM parameters provide, you can refine your strategies, optimize your spending, and ultimately drive more profitable results.

When it comes to monitoring and keeping track of your visitors, UTM tracking offers unequaled precision and depth. You can measure traffic from different channels and see the findings in Google Analytics, which is convenient and easy to use.

The degree of information from a commercial tool would be outstanding: put up UTM correctly, and you will see how many visitors originated from a certain tweet or an image in a given newsletter.

UTM tracking delivers the information you need to make data-driven decisions, from following whole initiatives to A/B testing changes in graphics, location, and content. In the upcoming sections of this article, we shall be looking at what UTM Parameters are and how they can be put to their effective use.

What are UTM Parameters?

UTM is the abbreviation of Urchin Traffic Monitor. UTM parameters (also known as UTM codes) are alphanumeric strings that may append to URLs to permit you to detect when they are browsed on. The information in the program is picked up by Google Analytics and logged with the clickthrough rate using UTM parameters. The data collected is viewable in Google Analytics, allowing you to trace traffic regarding where it originated and how it arrived at your site.

Using your analytics medium of choice, the characteristics will enable you to effectively measure user involvement from other resources. Google uses cookies to monitor visitors, but UTMs allow you to replace Google’s regular surveillance with personalized tracking using characteristics specific to your requirements.

When you use UTMs on your URLs, Google Research will show you where your customers came from, which advertising they were a member of, the path they took to get to you, and details on approximately where on the screens they landed and the phrases they used.

Quite sneaky by the sound of its working, right?

It has more intricacies within itself, and we shall find out about the working of UTM Parameters in google analytics in the section below.

How do these UTM Parameters work?

You append the UTM parameter to the end of your URL when you produce some information with a connection, whether a short piece, an ad, a networking post, or anything. This generates a new, distinct URL that may be monitored. When Google Analytics imports the data, they remove the UTM parameter from the URL and place the data from that excerpt into the determined size.

So, what can be tracked with the help of UTM Parameters?

Social Networking–

UTM parameters in google analytics help track your social media activities and demonstrate which content performed best on which platform.

Mails–

UTMs can be added to in-email addresses. Within the same email, you can obtain distinct click-through numbers — Are more people beating the link at the top of the lower side? Get precision by tagging the same home page or registration URL in messages sent to various lists or at varying periods.

Bulletins and advertisements–

With UTMs, PPC marketing may be closely controlled. A/B test designs, images, size, and content to differentiate between column and headline advertisement or bulletin performance.

And a lot more-

UTM stands for Urchin Traffic Monitor.

It is an industry-standard to track marketing campaigns across different platforms. It lets you track user engagement accurately from external sources within your preferred analytics platforms.

UTM parameters is a series of code positioned at the end of an URL to explain the source, medium, campaign, term, and the piece of content that directed the user to your website.

UTM parameters start with a “?” symbol and come after the primary URL address. The series looks something like this:

?utm_source=google&utm_medium=display&utm_campaign=winter-collection&utm_term=sweaters&utm_content=guide

In this example, the user clicked on this link that came from a Google Display “Winter Collection” campaign that was triggered by the term “sweaters” and showed off “guide” content.

As you might have realized that this kind of information can be extremely useful to track how successful a particular campaign was.

How UTM Parameters Work

When you make a content piece, whether it is a social media post or an ad copy, containing a link, add the UTM at the end of your URL. This will create a new URL that you can track.

For example, abc.com and abc.com/?utm_source=google are two separate webpages.

Google Analytics (or any other analytics platform of your choice) removes the UTM from the URL and places the data from that snippet into the proper dimensions, i.e., source, medium, campaign, term, and content.

Why We Use UTM Parameters

The primary goal of using UTM is to track the success of campaigns. If you are building different pages for every piece of content you publish, you can easily track their effectiveness.

So, rather than seeing a source/medium as Twitter/referral for any traffic coming from Twitter, you can see Twitter/Paid-Winter.

This also enables you to see the difference in performance from your organic Twitter efforts and paid winter Twitter campaign efforts.

In the same way, if you have a winter campaign running on various platforms, you can assign the platform using unique UTMs for each platform.

UTM parameters offer more relevant information about how people interact with your content, which helps you gain in-depth insights, allowing you to create better campaigns for your company next time. These also help you in understanding your site traffic better.

There are five UTM Parameters:

Source: where the traffic is coming from, e.g., Google, Facebook, etc.

Medium: how the traffic is coming, e.g., email, social media, etc.

Campaign: why the traffic is coming

Term: which search term or keyword is bringing in the most traffic

Content: which link (image, ad, button, text) is working best.

Which UTM Parameters Are Required

These are the five UTM parameters that you can add to a URL:

utm_source

utm_medium

utm_campaign

utm_term

utm_content

As per Google, the first three parameters i.e., source, medium, and campaign are required while the last two i.e., term and content, are optional.

How to Add UTM Parameters in a URL

Using a URL builder like Google’s Campaign URL Builder is the best way to add the UTM parameter to a URL. Fill in the fields with related campaign information, and once you are done adding the parameters, copy and paste the URL wherever you want.

Is There Any Definite Order of UTM Parameters?

There is no definite order. In fact, the order of the UTM parameters does not matter at all provided that you are starting the tags with a question mark “?” and joining them with an ampersand “&.”

Do UTM Parameters Impact SEO?

UTM parameters are just used for tracking the results of the URLs you are sharing online. They are not used for SEO purposes or have any effect on SEO. Neither will they boost your site’s SERPs rankings, nor will they harm them.

Best Practices for UTM Parameters

When making your UTM parameters, follow these best practices –

Use lowercase letters in your UTMs

UTMs are case sensitive, which is why the majority of people recommend using lowercase letters only. Therefore make sure you are consistent regardless of what you decide.

For example, Google Analytics will recognize utm_source=facebook and utm_source=Facebook as different sources.

Use dashes instead of underscores

Experts recommend using dashes instead of underscores to separate terms in your URLs. For instance, use facebook-ad instead of facebook_ad. If not, you can use the plus + symbol, facebook+ad. Whatever you choose, do not leave spaces.

Use simple language

Everyone can see the UTM parameters you are using. So it is best that you use simple language that others can easily understand instead of scaring away a user from clicking the link.

Keep the UTM parameters simple and short.

Avoid using too many words to define your parameters. It makes them messy and unreadable. For example,

A short tag like this: utm_campaign=navigation-menu

is better than a long tag like this: utm_campaign=big_drop_down_menu_in_the_navigation_bar

Use a URL shortener

Once you add the UTM parameters to your URL, it might get a little too lengthy. Use a URL shortener to keep your URLs tidy and easy to read. There are plenty of free tools available online.

Track all your parameters

Decide one central location to track all of your UTM parameters for all campaigns. There are multiple UTM tracking tools available online. Whichever tool you choose, make a user guide for your team so that they can easily and consistently read and make the parameters.

Mistakes That You Should Avoid Making With UTM Parameters

Here are a few mistakes that one would want to avoid with their UTM parameters:

Never use UTMs on internal links

Do not use UTM parameters on internal links. You will end up losing your tracking data.

For example, when a user clicks on an internal UTM link, the current session will end, and a new one will start. Any consequent action the user takes will be credited to the internal source instead of the external one that led them to your website in the first place.

Never use personal information.

Avoid using personal information such as someone’s name, phone number, or email address in the UTM parameters as these are visible to the public. Revealing private and sensitive information will most likely violate your analytics platform’s terms of service.

How to Track UTM Parameters

Once you add UTM parameters to your social media campaigns, you will want to track their performance.

You can find your UTM data in your Google Analytics dashboard by following these steps:

Acquisition>All Traffic>Source/Medium

Acquisition>Campaigns>All Campaigns

You can access the data of the three main UTM parameters i.e., source, medium, and campaign through the “Primary Dimension” section.

However, to check the other two parameters i.e., term and content, you can either click on the “Other” option available in the “Primary Dimension” section or select a “Secondary Dimension.” In Google Analytics: utm_term is for Keyword, and utm_content is for Ad Content.

For instance, in the “Secondary Dimension” field, you can type the name of the parameter i8.e. Keyword or Ad Content to access the data you were looking for.

Conclusion

When you use UTM parameters correctly, it can provide you and your marketing teams with tons of valuable information. Using UTM parameters is easy with the majority of analytical tools, especially Google Analytics. It highlights the best sources of your website traffic and best performing campaigns.

Hariom Balhara is an inventive person who has been doing intensive research in particular topics and writing blogs and articles for E Global Soft Solutions. E Global Soft Solutions is a digital marketing, seo, smo, ppc and web development company that comes with massive experiences. We specialize in digital marketing, web designing and development, graphic design, and a lot more.

This was written for the Bitly blog by Customer Success Data Analyst Intern Zach Schleien.

As a digital marketer, it is your job to better understand and maximize your viewership. Traditionally, marketers use UTM parameters (unique identifiers tied to the URL) and set up campaigns to identify where their audience is coming from. However, marketers often delegate this task to more technical people.

Setting up UTM parameters can get tricky, especially when using it for multiple sources and mediums. When you’re not technical and decide to delegate this task out, it wastes time, money, and resources.

What if there was a way to understand your viewership and know where they’re coming from by hacking UTM parameters?