If you can’t track it, then it doesn’t exist.
That is the maxim every marketer lives by. How do you know where your leads are coming from? How can you tell that a campaign was successful? Are you optimizing the channels that bring in the most leads?
Don’t worry — if these questions are keeping you up at night, UTM codes can help.
Tracking links or UTM codes are essentially tags added to the ends of URLs that identify the specific source, medium of delivery, campaign, and/or keywords that are driving your leads. Think of it this way: if the digital landscape were the ocean and marketers were marine biologist, then UTM codes would be like the tracking devices put on dolphins (or in this analogy, leads) to see how they migrate.*
Photo Credit: SEFSC Beaufort Lab
*No dolphins were harmed in the making of this post.
UTM codes are not link shorteners like bitly, and they don’t interfere with your site or landing page; they are purely for analytics purposes. Want to see if a guest post drives traffic to your site? Add a unique UTM code to the post, and you’ll be able to see just that. In short, UTM codes are an essential tool in a proactive marketing strategy that can provide valuable insights about the traffic in your marketing funnel.
Still confused about what a UTM code is? Well, UTM stands for Urchin Traffic Monitor.
…still confused? Here’s an example: let’s say you’re a Warby Parker email subscriber and their Spring forward email campaign appealed to your eyewear enthusiasm.
Source: Warby Parker Spring Forward Email Campaign.
Click a link in the email, and the URL you are directed to bears the UTM code for the medium (email), source (ExactTarget), and the campaign (Spring Forward).
Source: Warby Parker, Spring Forward Campaign
Ready to start creating your own UTM codes? Check out the Google Analytics URL Builder, which offers a step-by-step process to create custom campaigns using URL parameters. The URL builder also offers more UTM code insight with in-depth breakdown of each UTM parameter.
Source: Google Analytics URL Builder
But before you start UTM coding, don’t forget! Just because we call them UTM codes doesn’t mean only marketers can decipher them. While it’s important that your UTM codes serve your purposes, keep in mind that they are visible (i.e. you probably don’t want to tag a URL with a UTM code like “campaign=Unqualified Leads”). Any marketing department will have to handle pools of unqualified leads, but it doesn’t sit well for a lead to hear — or in this case, see — that she is unqualified.