As a digital marketer, you most likely have multiple campaigns running at the same time. Keeping a tab on all the traffic, lead and conversion sources can be difficult. You want to know which source, medium or pages are getting the leads and which ones are eating up your marketing budget, which ones to optimize and those to be completely shut down? Which as far as digital marketing goes, is the biggest parameter for measuring lead generation success.
UTM tracking solves this problem by telling you exactly where the traffic, leads, clicks or submissions are coming from.
So, what is UTM tracking?
In simple terms, UTM tracking is adding a tail of parameters to your default URL, which gets attached to the web visitor when they act on that URL (like a click or submit)
For example, if this is your URL
www.abc.com
the tracking code could be abc.com/pagename/source=social-media
Let’s take an example of LeadSquared UTM tracker (it takes less than 60 seconds)
First, Select the page you want to track. Then select a source
Similarly, you can select the medium
And you can then select the campaign name
After this step, you will get a unique tracking id, with UTM parameters like this
You will create similar UTM tracking URL’s for all your campaigns and when the lead submits on those URL’s you will get the complete information attached with those leads.
For example, if John submits on this page or campaigns, the lead information will be like this
Name: John
Submitted on: www.abc.com
Campaign Source: social media
Campaign medium: facebook
Campaign name: new year
The same will be done for all the leads and give you a holistic view of your lead generation performance
What can you track with UTM?
Your UTM tracking codes, as indicated earlier, take you deeper into the analysis of your traffic, leads, and conversions. Let’s see exactly what are they :
Know the exact source of your traffic
The parameter (utm_source) tells you where traffic is coming from and allows you to track it. This is normally the website name. In other cases, it could be an application. Bottom line is you can easily track a URL back to sources like Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, etc.
Which channels are bringing the visitors
Utm_medium parameter answers the question of “which”? Which of the mediums online brought that visitor to your landing page. This includes email, social, display, search, referral, and so on. Tracking each channel used for your marketing campaign helps you measure their individual performance over a period of time.
Measure by campaign
This is very useful, especially if you have 2 or more campaigns running at the same time. This way, you can determine which of them is generating more traffic and ultimately, performing better. The parameter, utm_campaign, tells you which of the campaigns brought a particular visitor to your website.
Identify high-converting CTAs
People often pay more attention to the first three than the final two, but they can be equally integral to the success of your UTM tracking. In the event you have more than one call-to-action on your landing page pointing to the same link, say for the purpose of A/B testing, the utm_content parameter tells you which one was clicked and the ones that were neglected.
Track your keywords as well
When you’re running a PPC campaign, the utm_term parameter helps to track which of the employed keywords was searched for by a visitor before landing on your page. You can also quickly recognize the more redundant keywords and stop paying for them since they’re not generating any results.
UTM tracking doesn’t end with your website
Most marketers tend to use UTM tracking codes for their websites alone. When, in fact, it works just the same way in tracking the traffic you’re getting from your apps. As with most marketing teams these days, ads are often running on mobile apps, too. App UTM tracking gives you an overview of which of the apps are generating the highest returns on investment.
Numbers don’t lie
The best decisions are always drawn from the data. Beyond measuring the success of online campaigns, UTM tracking enables you to gather insights that can be useful for increasing leads, traffic, and conversion. For instance, embedding UTM codes in all your landing page URLs will reveal which of them is converting people faster, which ads and copy people are engaging the most with, and should thus be placed in premium. UTM tracking gives you the chance to test and retest quickly, without digging deep into your budget any more than you should.
And it takes less than 60 seconds to create a tracking URL. Try it free
