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One crucial aspect of being an effective marketer is being able to measure your successes. Whatever metrics you use, you want to provide people involved with all of the ammunition available to prove what you are doing in the digital and social media world are is on point. However, measuring the impact of digital marketing initiatives can prove to be kind of tricky without the proper tools and techniques. You might know that Facebook is driving a certain percentage of traffic to your website, but do you know if your companies Facebook posts are the ones driving that traffic?
Through the magic of UTM tracking codes you can add a few special characters to the end of your URL’s to prove what traffic is having the impact.
What are UTM tracking codes
UTM codes are also know as UTM parameters. They are little snippets of text that are added the end of URL’s to help track the success of digital content. Here is an example of what the code might look like – with the bold being the UTM addition to the URL:
http://www.christophergilmer.com/demystifying-utm-tracking-codes?utm_campaign=blogpost&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook
The snippets of code after the question mark will not affect the way in which your webpage is displayed, it simply communicates to your analytics software, letting it know that someone has arrived through a particular marketing channel as part of a certain campaign.
What story do UTM tracking codes tell
UTM codes commonly track five things for your digital marketing initiative:
- Campaign: Groups all of the content from one campaign into your analytics. Ex: utm_campaign=GuestBlogPost
- Source: What website is sending you traffic. Ex: utm_source=Facebook
- Medium: The type of marketing medium that the link is on. Ex: utm_medium=DisplayAd
- Content: This is used to track the different content types that point to the same URL from the same campaign, source and medium codes. Its more commonly used in PPC. Ex: utm_content=headerbarlink, utm_content=rightsidelink
- Term: Identification of the keywords you’ve paid for in a PPC ad. Ex: utm_term=plumbingtechnician
How to setup UTM tracking codes
Setting up UTM tracking codes could never be easier… thanks to Google. They have an easy to use UTM tracking code Campaign builder. Enter your website url. campaign source, campaign medium, campaign name, campaign content and the builder builds a URL string for you.
Happy tracking!