What Exactly is a UTM?

A UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) is a tag appended to the end of a URL. When this UTM tag is appended, it allows you to track referral traffic much more accurately. Without appending UTMs to your links, you’ll only track the general source of your traffic (such as AdWords or Facebook) instead of the specific campaign or post (such as an individual blog post). This allows you to take the guesswork out of how various ads, pieces of content, and other mediums are performing on a campaign level.

Here is an example of a normal url:

  • http://bijoumind.com/

This an example of the same link with a UTM tag:

To break this down further, a UTM consists of several different components: website URL, campaign source, campaign medium, campaign term, campaign content, and campaign name.

  • Website URL: http://bijoumind.com
  • Campaign Name: product
  • Campaign Source: google
  • Campaign Medium: cpc
  • Campaign Term: segmentation
  • Campaign Content: mixpanel

Each of these comes with a very specific purpose; so before we go any further, let’s  nail down the basics.

Campaign Name: This acts as the identifier for a specific campaign, product, or offering that you’re driving traffic to. It’s required for all UTMs.

Campaign Source: This is the referrer of traffic to your page, such as Google, Facebook or Outbrain. In many cases, this is the platform or tool you used to create the medium.

Campaign Medium: This is the marketing medium that referred the traffic. So, unlike the source, it tracks the type of traffic such as a banner ad, an email, or a Facebook post.

Campaign Term (optional): While this is optional, creating a campaign term allows you to track the paid keywords of an ad or even the keyword of the link in a blog post.

Campaign Content (optional): This is another optional part of a UTM, but including this allows you to easily differentiate between ads on the same channel, like Reddit ads, which comes in handy when you’re A/B testing various images or ad copy.

What are the Advantages of Using a UTM?

A UTM tag does a lot more than just show you the referral source of traffic. Quite honestly, just about anyone can see that with basic analytics in place. A UTM allows you to see exactly what drove traffic. This includes the referral source, but adds the type of traffic, content, keywords, and campaign, and ultimately the conversion metrics. This is how great data-driven marketers are able to track all of their traffic generation sources and measure their performance at scale.

#utm #analytics

Full Article: http://effinamazing.com/blog/the-ultimate-guide-to-utm-builder-for-online-utm-building/