Marketing activities on the Internet require constant monitoring and analysis. To track the effectiveness of running contextual advertising, it is necessary to use special tools.
UTM tags are considered to be one such tool. They are designed to transfer information about the source of traffic to analytical systems and services. This data allows you to thoroughly analyze and evaluate the effectiveness of the developed advertising campaign.
What are UTM tags?
UTM-tag (the name comes from the English abbreviation Urchin Tracking Module) is a kind of variable, which consists of the name of the parameter and its value. These data are specified in the URL-address of the page.
Important! Links that contain such tags are recommended to be used only if you need to work with external traffic sources. Inserting tags into internal links may cause problems with search engine indexing of pages and errors in tracking the statistics of transitions through external channels.
What are UTM tags for?
What are UTM tags for? Using UTM-tags allows you to:
Get information about all transitions to a certain page, as well as the source of traffic. All this information can be obtained and analyzed using reports from special analytical programs or services (Google Analytics, Yandex Metrika, Facebok Pixel, etc.);
Get detailed statistics on the fulfillment of the goals of the advertising campaign (requests, sales, filling out forms on the site);
Select only profitable advertising channels, as well as the most “money” keywords and sites from the general pool.
What types of UTM tags are there?
UTM tags are divided into two main types – mandatory and optional.
Mandatory
They contain the required minimum set of parameters. They are quite enough for most advertising campaigns. The rest are added when more thorough analytics are required.
utm_source. The parameter is necessary to indicate the source of traffic. It indicates to the advertiser where the user came from. Most often it is the name of a search engine or social network – google, bing, facebook, etc.
utm_medium. Transmits the type of traffic and helps to know through which channel the user was attracted. For example, cpc for contextual advertising, organic for organic search engine results, email for mailing lists, etc.
Optional (optional tags)
With the help of this type of UTM tags, you can expand the list of collected data about the target audience, detail the data obtained. Thanks to these tags it is possible to conduct A/B testing of various ads, banners, get a list of keywords that drove traffic to the site and much more.
Optional tags include:
utm_campaign. Used to mark a specific advertising campaign or PR-action. For example, you can use the tag black_friday or new_year_promo.
utm_term. The parameter is used to track the performance of keywords in contextual advertising. It helps to know which user search queries are the most effective, and which ones can be removed from the advertising campaign.
utm_content. If you use several different links to the same page within an advertising campaign, you can use this tag to label each individual link.
What does a UTM tag consist of?
The structure of UTM-tag is formed according to a certain pattern:
Parameter. It denotes the type of UTM tag that is used. There are two mandatory and three optional parameters.
Parameter value. It must be unique for each parameter, for example – “cpc”, “bing”, etc.
Sign “=”. Used to connect a parameter and its value.
Ampersand (&). Connects different parameter-value pairs within a single UTM tag.
Question mark (?). Separates the main URL from the UTM parameters.
Where are UTM tags used?
Campaigns in contextual advertising. An advertiser can apply tags to understand which of the marketing campaigns brought the most clients and conversions, which keywords worked best, whether this or that sale was successful, etc.
Email marketing. You can tag links when sending promotional emails or newsletters to see which ones lead to action on the part of recipients (purchase a product, register for a webinar, etc.).
Social Media. You can place links when posting posts or targeting ads on social networks. In the subsequent analysis, you can identify which platforms bring more traffic to the site and which publications brought the bulk of conversions.
Affiliate Programs. To understand how many sales came from partners and affiliates, an advertiser can also use UTM.
How do I add a UTM tag to a link?
Adding a tag is not a complicated process if we are talking about several links. To do this, select the URL you want to track and define a set of necessary parameters (traffic source and channel, keywords, campaign).
The tag is connected to the main link via “?”. If there is more than one, all subsequent UTMs are connected with an ampersand (&). Separate the parameter and its value with “=”.
If you have a lot of URLs to mark up, it’s easier to automate the process. Google Campaign URL Builder or any other online tool can help with this. You need to enter all the necessary parameters there, and the output is a ready-made link with UTM:
How to track UTM tags?
As a rule, you can track clicks on such links in Google Analytics. The tool automatically recognizes UTM tags and includes information about traffic sources in reports.
To do this, you need to find the “Traffic Sources” item in the left vertical menu. Here you will be able to find the source and channel (utm_source and utm_medium). Information about a specific advertising campaign can be found in the “All Campaigns” section. The values of the utm_term parameter are included in the “Keywords” report.
Dynamic UTM tags for use in Google AdWords
In addition to mandatory and optional tags, such advertising systems as Google Ads, Yandex.Direct and Facebook provide additional parameters that can be used when running an advertising campaign in these networks. The table shows examples of such tags for Google Adwords.
How to use UTM-tags correctly – useful tips
Creating UTM-tags is not an easy process that requires certain skills to work with it, the ability to correctly interpret and analyze the received information.
There are some tips for optimizing work with them:
A link with a UTM tag should contain only letters of the Latin alphabet;
A question mark is required at the end of the link and before the label itself;
It is better to use the same sequence of variables in the URL to label links. This will make the resulting label more readable, especially if several different specialists are involved in the project;
Place an equal sign “=” before the value of parameters, or variables;
Use only one case to set labels (for example, GOOGLE and google will be displayed as 2 different traffic sources in the final report);
Only Latin letters, digits, hyphens, dots or the “+” sign may be used in the variable name. If it is necessary to add other designations, it is necessary to use the ASCII encoding system;
Remember that when creating labels it is inadmissible to use spaces. Instead of them use the plus sign “+”;
Labels should be separated from each other. This can be done by using the ampersand “&”;
The sequence of placing parameters in the link text is not fundamental;
In the case when a label should be attached to a link in which a hash is specified with the help of the grid sign “#” – the full text with the hash is placed after this icon;
Sometimes the site you are working with may be configured to redirect URLs with a certain value (e.g., “?”). Therefore, before launching RK, it is better to check if the site does not cut off the addresses of pages with tags.
How to set up UTM tags in Google Ads?
In order to add UTM tags to your Google Ads account, a so-called tracking template is used. This string can be supplemented with the necessary parameters that will be tracked in analytical systems.
Google will automatically add a chain of necessary parameters to the URL when the user goes to the site on the AdWords ad.
You can customize UTM tags in Google Ads at the level of:
advertising account;
an advertising campaign;
groups of ads.
It is also possible to assign separate tags for a specific ad or keyword.
Important! If tags are added at the ad account level, they will be pulled up for nested groups, RCs, ads, and keywords. In the future, you can connect an additional tracking template that will work at a lower level – for example, for an individual ad. Then Google will give priority to it.
To customize the tracking template, type {lpurl} in the appropriate line (this shortcode Google Ads perceives as the URL of the landing page), and then after the question mark “?” add the desired tags, separating them from each other with an ampersand (&):
Warning! If UTM tags are used only to view data from Google Ads in Analytics statistics, you can do something simpler. Establish a connection between your Google Ads and Google Analytics accounts, then data on conversions and ad clicks will be sent automatically, without the use of tags.
All the information written above is relevant for search advertising campaigns. For Google Shopping, you can only set the tracking template at the campaign level. To add separate tags for different URLs in product campaigns, you need to modify the data feed for manual upload to Merchant Center.
Top 5 mistakes of internet marketers
Advertising UTM tags work effectively only if they are properly created and used rationally. To meet these conditions, you need to learn how to avoid the most typical mistakes.
The most common mistakes when working with labels:
Missing a question mark before the tag itself. In this case, the browser used by the user does not read it as a label, but tries to find a non-existent page on the site;
Absence of the separating sign “&” (ampersand) between tags. In this case, analytical services will not be able to recognize where one label ends and the second begins, and will produce incorrect statistics;
Presence of several question marks. The browser will automatically replace question marks with special characters and will again produce incorrect statistics;
Misprints in parameter names. The data carried by the label will remain unaccounted for;
Different variable names in different campaigns. For example, if you add a UTM tag in one campaign where the source is designated as “fb” and in another as “facebook” – it will be extremely difficult to analyze the overall statistics.
