Don’t we all want to better understand our marketing strategy? To know what works, what fails, and what remains constant?

To do that you would need to differentiate your tactics and evaluate each based on its singular successes or lack thereof. You would need to separate organic traffic, paid media, earned media, email outreach, off site efforts, and so on. But how do you even begin to unravel this mess of multiple tactics and identify how effective or ineffective each is? Easily, as long as you have our free downloadable UTM Generator and Tracker.

What are UTM Links?

UTM (or Urchin Tracking Module) links allow you to quickly and easily create unique links for a webpage that identify the source of the traffic to that page, the tactic used to capture the visitor, and the campaign each visitor is associated with. UTM links are designed to provide the most accurate measurement of unique website visitors.

For example: you may have multiple tactics driving traffic to a landing page, from search engine optimization, to Google AdWords, to a direct mail campaign or billboard ad. If you use unique UTM links, you can attribute how much traffic, as well as how much qualified / conversion ready traffic, each tactic produced.

Using our simple tool, you can create and organize your tactics, campaigns, and the links associated with them in seconds. Here’s what you need to know.

UTM Parameters

There are six parameters you can add to your URLs within the tool:

Destination URL: The URL for the page visitors will be landing on. For instance, if you wanted visitors to land on the Arc Intermedia homepage, the destination URL would be www.arcintermedia.com.

utm_source: Identify the advertiser, site, publication, etc. that is sending traffic to your property. For example: google, newsletter4, billboard.

utm_medium: The advertising or marketing medium. For example: cpc, banner, email newsletter.

utm_campaign: The individual campaign name, slogan, promo code, etc. for a product.

utm_content: Used to differentiate similar content, or links within the same ad. If you have two call-to-action links within the same email message, for example, you can use utm_content and set different values for each so that you can tell which version is more effective.

utm_term: Identify paid search keywords. If you’re manually tagging paid keyword campaigns, you should also use utm_term to specify the keyword.

Using the image above as the parameter values, this is what your custom link will look like:

Note: %20 represents a space between words. If you do not wish to see that in your url, do not include spaces in your descriptions. For example, in the image above it reads usa fall 2017 under campaign. If you do not want %20 in your URL, you would remove the spaces or insert dashes: usafall2017 or usa-fall-2017.

The aforementioned parameters are used to create unique links that can be easily tracked and sorted within Google Analytics. For example, you might use the following parameter-value pairs for a Summer Sale campaign:

utm_source = summer-mailer to identify traffic that results from your Summer Sale email campaign.

utm_medium = email to identify traffic from the email campaign vs. the in-app campaign.

utm_campaign = summer-sale to identify the overall campaign.

Mandatory Fields

In order to create a link with sufficient data, you will be required to provide values or information for the destination URL, source, medium, and campaign. Content and term are optional fields that can be used for additional segmenting or differentiation when there are multiple similar campaigns running. If you do not provide values for the mandatory fields, you will receive an error message specifying which piece of information is missing.

Warning

Never switch source and medium values.

Source should always be the origin of your traffic. Medium should always be the tactic that brought visitors to the page or destination URL.

This tactic can be organic, direct, paid, email, referral, or an individual tactic specified by you. If you are engaging in influencer marketing, your custom value for medium could be Influencer Marketing. If you are engaging in direct mail, your custom value could be Direct Mail.

But if you switch your values for source and medium, you will be unable to properly track and attribute your efforts essentially making the UTM superfluous.

Organizing Your Links

Now that you’ve created all these links, how do you plan on organizing them? This tool does not just generate UTM links, it also helps you track them.

You have already seen that each link should be attributed to a campaign – in the spreadsheet you can also dictate a start date and end date for each campaign. These field are not mandatory but they do help organize links and provide context when reviewing efforts and traffic for the month, quarter, or even the year.

We hope this tool helps. If you would like to discuss additional ways Arc Intermedia can elevate your marketing strategy, please visit our contact page.