A UTM parameter is a piece of text added to the end of a URL which lets you see how many visits your website has received as a result of specific marketing activity. The text is included in something called a query string which can be identified by a question mark in the URL, followed by the letters ‘utm’. Everything to the left of the question mark is the actual URL, and everything to the right (surrounded by the blue in the screen shot below) is the query string. UTM parameters are a type of query string which includes user defined information that analytics platforms can read.
What does UTM stand for? Once upon a time there was a digital analytics platform run by a company called Urchin. Urchin came up with a way of tracking links using query strings, which they called tracking modules. So UTM stands for Urchin Tracking Module. Google bought Urchin a while ago and created Google Analytics, but by then UTMs had become so well known that Google kept the acronym.
Why are UTM parameters important?
UTMs are important because they allow digital marketers to track digital marketing campaigns. At a basic level, if you use a UTM when posting a link to your website from your Facebook account, then you’ll be able to look in your analytics platform and see exactly how many website visits and online sales the that post generated (assuming you’ve set up conversions). Let’s say you spent $100 boosting your Facebook post, and by using a UTM parameter you can see that the post generated 25 visits to your website. That means your post drove traffic at a rate of $4 per visit ($100/25). Now if you dig a little deeper in your analytics platform you might see that this traffic converted at a rate of 20%, meaning these 25 visits resulted in 5 sales, at a cost per conversion of $20 ($100/5).
Now let’s take this a step further and look at your profit margin. If the thing you sell online makes you more than $20 in profit, then your Facebook post made you money. However if you make less than $20 profit per sale, then that post cost you money and you need to think a bit about what you’re doing.
Components of UTM parameters
There are five different components that make up UTM parameters, with each one giving a different piece of information. You don’t have to use all five of them, in fact many people just use the first three or four.
- “utm_source” is the term which best describes where the link is appearing. This may be the name of a social network such as Facebook, the name of an advertising platform or website you’re placing an ad on (e.g. Google), or the name of a business partner who is promoting your business via their online channels. If you were using Facebook for this, you would put “utm_source=facebook” after the question mark in your URL.
- “utm_medium” is used to describe the marketing medium, or category. This could be email, referral, display or social. To continue with the example above, for a Facebook post you’d usually use “utm_medium=social”.
- “utm_campaign” is used to distinguish the specific campaign or promotion you’re running. Your Facebook post might be a Summer special, and in this case you might use “utm_campaign=summer”.
- “utm_content” is used to differentiate between different types of content or ads in your campaign. You might have an image of an ice cream in one post and a beach in the other. For the latter you’d use “utm_content=beach”.
- “utm_term” isn’t used all that often, because Google ads integrates so nicely with Google Analytics and shows paid search performance natively in the platform once you connect your Google Ads and Analytics accounts. But if you want to, you can use this to describe the keyword that you are bidding on in a paid search ad. For example you might want to run a search ad in Google Ads targeting people who are searching for the term “summer”. In this case you’d use “utm_term=summer”
It can be hard to build these parameters manually, so there are a variety of tools out there that build them for you, such as this one from Google. Here you can put all the information into an online form and Google will then generate the campaign URL with the UTM parameters for you.
After entering your information in the UTM fields, the tool will generate a URL for you which can be copied and pasted wherever you need it.
Best Practices
It’s really important to be consistent when creating UTM parameters, because any differences will show up in your analytics reports. It’s also important to know that UTMs are case sensitive. You don’t want half of your social post traffic to appear as “Social” and the other as “social”.
Once you get the hang of how UTMs work, you can move away from the Google tool and start using a spreadsheet to build them yourself. The added benefit of this is you’ll then have a record of all of your campaign URLs which you can then use as a base for some basic digital reports to work out the cost per visit and conversion of your different pieces of digital marketing activity.
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