Regardless of the type of business you run or how good your product/service is, if your target audience doesn’t know about your brand, you’ll face challenges in reaching your revenue and profit goals.

This is where digital marketing has become a go-to option for many business owners. It’s a great way to get the word out about your brand and drive traffic to your business.

That said, while digital marketing has made marketing a much more accessible exercise for everyone, you may not always get the results you want. But how do you find out if your digital marketing services are working?

Adding UTM parameters to your marketing campaigns may be the solution you’re looking for!

What are UTMs?

UTMs, also known as Urchin Tracking Modules, are short text codes with parameters that you can add to the URLs (links) you’re using in your digital marketing campaigns. The best thing about them is they can be added to any link, including web pages, eCommerce, and social media profile links.

They can help you monitor the performance of your campaigns and measure their effectiveness by giving you insights into conversion and traffic data. UTM parameters can also help you A/B test your marketing campaigns.

These text codes are most effective when used in combination with analytics tools like Google Analytics, as they generate performance numbers that give you a detailed picture of how your campaigns are performing.

This can help you identify which marketing channels (mediums that you use to market your brand) are driving conversions and optimise your efforts to boost performance and ROI.

How can you use UTM parameters to measure campaign effectiveness?

Firstly, you need to know that 5 different UTM parameters can be added to web links. These include:

1. Campaign source: Allows you to track the source of the traffic (search engine, social media, or any other source)
2. Campaign medium: Indicates the specific channel that’s driving traffic (ads, organic social, email, and more)
3. Campaign name: Indicates the name of the campaign
4. Campaign term: Indicates specific key phrases or paid keywords
5. Campaign content: Allows you to track multiple ads within a campaign

If you’re using UTMs with Google Analytics, you must add the first three parameters to all links you need to track. You can add all five if you need to collect additional data.

When adding multiple parameters, they need to be separated with the ‘&’ symbol and all parameters must be added after the ‘?’ at the end of an URL.

Here’s an example of how a link would look after adding UTM parameters.

While UTMs might look long and complex, you don’t need to add them manually.

Instead, you can use UTM generators, like the Hootsuite Composer or the Google Analytics Campaign URL Builder, which generate the code automatically based on the parameters you want to track.  

You can simply copy the link and use it in your campaigns and you’ll be good to go.

If you feel like the links will look unsightly in your campaigns—in social posts, for example—you can use the link shorteners available on the above-mentioned UTM generators to shorten your links.

Once you’ve added the links and configured your campaigns, you can find all the data collected via UTMs in the ‘Reports’ tab on Google Analytics, which lets you export your data for further analysis.

Starting tracking and optimising your digital marketing campaigns with UTM parameters today

If you’ve been running digital marketing campaigns and have not used UTM parameters, you’re overlooking a lot of valuable information which can help optimise your campaigns.

So start using UTM parameters today and gain a birds-eye view of the performance and effectiveness of your marketing campaigns.

If you want to learn how to use UTM parameters to monitor and optimise your campaigns, feel free to get in touch with our team.

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