Whether you have an online store, a blog or a news site, you’re probably going to need to do communications campaigns. Google offers a tool that natively allows you to track these campaigns within its multiple tools: Google Analytics, Google Adwords, etc.
Together, we’ll see what a UTM is, what it’s for, how to track your campaigns with Google UTM, and how to create a UTM easily.
Table of Contents
What is a UTM?
A UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) is a tracking system that measures the impact of your marketing campaigns. I put marketing in quotation marks because it can be used without problem for a simple exchange of link between two bloggers for example.
A Google UTM is made up of a set of settings in a web address (a URL). This set of settings is then used by Google Analytics to “store” visitors in boxes that go well in your reports.
In practical terms, TMUs are particularly practical for measuring the impact of a newsletter or banner insert. Indeed, if you put a link in your newsletter that redirects to your site, without UTM, your visitors will be stored in the “direct” acquisition channel since Google Analytics will consider them as direct access to your site (basically, as if your visitor had typed the address of your website directly into his browser).
On the contrary, if the links contained in your newsletter contain UTM, you will be able to follow their trail in Google Analytics and they will be “ranked” in the acquisition media indicated by the UTM, email therefore for newsletters!
Here’s what a Google UTM looks like:
https://constantin-boulanger.fr/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=test_utmYou can see the URL of my home page followed by URL settings, utm_source, utm_medium and utm_campaign! I’m sure you’ve seen this before and you didn’t know what it was 🙂
How do I create a UTM?
A Google UTM can be composed of 3 to 5 settings. In fact, 3 parameters are mandatory, 2 are optional.
Here is the full list of these parameters:
| Setting name | Description | Mandatory |
|---|---|---|
utm_source | Use utm_source to identify a search engine, newsletter name or other source.Example: google | Yes |
utm_medium | Use utm_medium to identify a medium such as email or cost-per-click.Example: cpc | Yes |
utm_campaign | Use utm_campaign to identify a specific product promotion or strategic campaign.Example: spring_sale | Yes |
utm_term | Identifies search terms. Example: running-shoes | No |
utm_content | Precisely identifies what was clicked to bring the user to the site, such as a banner or text link. It is often used for A/B testing and targeted ad content. Example: utm_content- logolink or utm_content-textlink | No |
Even if it’s not very complicated, an error can quickly sneak in and above all, we clearly have better things to do than generate a Google UTM to the mano.
To help you create UTM simply, Google has set up a free tool that allows you to generate a complete URL containing the UTM settings that are going well.
This URL will be communicated to your providers when setting up a marketing campaign or during a link exchange, netlinking or any other and will allow you to follow the people who are brought back to your site from this link/campaign.
How to track your Analytics campaigns with UTM
Now that you know what a UTM is and you’ve set up TMMs everywhere, in your newsletters, on your link exchanges, netlinking and company, you’re now looking forward to following all of it in Google Analytics.
To find your UTM data in Google Analytics, visit analytics.google.com in the Acquisition > Campaigns > All Campaigns tab.
You can wander between the different primary dimensions of Campaign, Source, Support, and Source/Support.
For more granularity, the Source/Support ratio is pretty 🙂
In addition, you can also display a secondary dimension before you compare your campaigns and go further in the analysis.
That’s all! Now you know where to find your UTM tracking code data.