You might have designed a new social media campaign meant to drive traffic to your website… but how have people found their way to your site? Do you know what specific post generated actual leads?
As digital marketers it’s important to be able to measure the impact of your strategies, hence the use of “Urchin tracking modules” or UTM parameters. These are snippets of text added at the end of a URL to tag and then track where website traffic comes from when clicked.
The main idea with UTM codes is so that you can have a good understanding of how visitors interacted with a link you posted. Its parameters can tell you:
- The source: The website sending traffic. Eg. Facebook or Twitter.
- The medium: The medium your link is featured in. Eg. Social media or Email.
- The campaign: Grouping of all the content from a campaign that generated traffic. Eg. New product launch promotion or 2-for-1 sale.
For example, the link below has several UTM parameters attached. The digital marketer tagged this article link “source=facebook”, meaning this link was posted on facebook. Via Google Analytics or other CRM tools (Customer relationship management tools), marketers will be able to sort out which specific clicked link led to site traffic!
As UTMs are free and easy to create with online URL Builders, and extremely helpful for all your future campaigns, they’re a must-have tool for every digital marketer!
What other customer tracking tools do you know of? Why are they useful or important to know? Let’s share our knowledge!
Traversing the Digital 
Hi Ann! You produced an interesting read – I didn’t know about UTM until now! I think another digital marketing tool are SEOs which can impact analytics and algorithms such as Google’s. Digital Marketers can track what their competitors are doing and what ‘tags’ or keywords are more popular among their audience, helping them generate more relevant and engaging materials for consumers. I’ve briefly worked with SEOs and a large factor was tracking what keywords were popular among consumers which helped me produce blogposts and appear on the first page of Google searches.
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Thanks! SEOs are also important! They’re much trickier to control and manage though. Thanks for sharing!
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Wow, Same as Lina, this is the first time I heard about UTM. It would be an effective tool that would allow digital marketer to analyse their customer’s journey. With this, they can accurately see which touchpoint is more important than others. Very interesting! Keep it up ann!
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Thanks Runn! I actually stumbled on them for work, having the need to track where traffic to a link came from, so they’re a pretty important tool to familiarise yourself with!
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I’ve used UTM for a Facebook campaign and they are very useful in distinguishing which ad set is more successful than the others. This is a great reminder on the importance of using UTM’s. Thanks so much for a great blog post. – Steve
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Thanks Steve! You’re absolutely right, these parameters are crucial for determining traffic. Important to keep the small things in mind when you run a campaign!
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