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UTM Tagging

UTM Tagging

Feb 2022
Marcus von Stein
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Do you use Google Analytics to analyse traffic? Do you UTM tag your links?

UTM stands for Urchin Tracking Module and is a simple way to tag and track traffic from different sources/campaigns.

The UTM tag is a text bit that you put after the URL you want to track. For example, it might look like this (the UTM tag is bolded):
https://www.leadfront.com/?utm_source=Social&utm_medium=Banner&utm_campaign=Spring_sale

With UTM tagging, you can:

  • Compare different campaigns. 
  • Compare traffic coming from different sources. 
  • Measure which paid keyword performs best.

The different parameters

There are 5 different UTM parameters to use. The 3 that are usually used are Source, Medium and Campaign but if you want a bit more insight you can use all 5, it's entirely up to you but it's good to have some sort of structure. Below you will find what the different parameters are used for:

  • Campaign source (utm_source) - The source from which the traffic comes from such as Google, Facebook etc.
  • Campaign medium (utm_medium) - To see the type of traffic such as cpc, social, email etc.
  • Campaign name (utm_campaign) - The name of the campaign, for example Spring_sale
  • Campaign term (utm_term) - To track specific keywords, mainly used for keyword ads. 
  • Campaign content (utm_content) - Used to distinguish ads that have the same landing page, e.g. if you have two CTA buttons in an email, "content" helps you distinguish the two.



analysis


How to create a UTM tag? 

When it comes to creating the UTM tag, there are two different ways you can use. The first option is to use a URL generation tool, where you fill in the various fields and a link with the UTM tag is generated. You can find such a tool at the bottom of this post.

The other option you can use is to create it yourself using a spreadsheet. The advantage is that you can create several pieces in quantities and it will be easier to create a structure in how to name them.

Things to consider when naming your UTM tag

When naming your UTM tag, it is important to remember not to use spaces or it will not work. Instead, use - or _ when naming for example spring_sale or spring-sale.

Create a naming convention to keep everything structured so that there is no room for mistakes.

UTM tags are case sensitive. You should consistently use the same format when tagging your links, otherwise your campaigns will show up on different rows in Google Analytics.

incorrect utm tagging

Therefore, it is important to determine the structure in advance and document and onboard everyone who will be using the UTM tagging structure to avoid duplicates in your analytics data. 

When you have an anchor link in your URL, you need to place it after the UTM tag for it to work. As in this example (anchor link is bolded) https://www.leadfront.com/om-oss#bokasnack if we were to make this a UTM tag it could look like this https://www.leadfront.com/om-oss?utm_source=social&utm_medium=banner&utm_campaign=spring_sale#bokasnack

Examples of when UTM tags are useful

Social media

For example, the URL of your social media profile, such as Instagram, can be URL-tagged to track how many people click through to your website - another option is to publish posts. 

Email

When sending out emails, it is useful to UTM tag the links on different CTAs to see which CTAs got the most clicks and which campaign the visitor engaged with. 

Visitors who come via email usually stay longer on the website. Sometimes it can be interesting to exclude this traffic source when analysing your website traffic and visitor engagement levels. 

Where can I find the data?

Now that you have UTM-tagged your links and want to see how they perform, click on Google Analytics - Acquisition - Campaigns - All Campaigns where you will get an overview of how your campaigns are performing. Here you can see which campaigns are driving the most traffic and the quality of the traffic coming in if it has a high bounce rate, for example. You can also add other filters depending on what you want to analyze such as new users, time periods, how long they have stayed on the page and much more. 

Here you can create your UTM tag:

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