What Are UTMs Anyway?

UTM stands for Urchin Tracking Module, and they are used by web developers, marketing teams, and the platforms where your marketing appears. Essentially, UTMs are strings of code added to the end of URLs (a web address) that track how visitors access a webpage and interact with your content. While the new URL may look different, the destination does not change—you are not creating a new page. In fact, the same page can have multiple UTMs that correspond to different traffic sources (e.g. an email or digital ad).

You may recognize UTMs from what is seemingly gibberish at the end of a link you click on. But that gibberish is anything but—the code (also referred to as UTM parameters or tags) attached to these URLs helps you track each link and gather insightful data regarding your marketing efforts.

UTMs are created by you or your marketing partner in the various platforms where your marketing will appear. In many cases, that means Google Analytics. In the case of a tool like Mailchimp that your organization might use for email marketing, Google Analytics can be linked to the emails to incorporate the UTMs you are tracking. Regardless of the platform, you enter the information in fields corresponding to the parameter being tracked, after which a unique URL will be produced that enables you to track your visitors and better measure a campaign’s effectiveness.

For example, if you are driving potential donors to a landing page from an email, Facebook ad, Instagram ad, and an ad on Google’s display network, different UTMs associated with each platform would enable you to determine which marketing effort is most effective at driving potential donors to the landing page. Again, the different UTMs would all go to the same place—the landing page for donors—but you would have insight into how those visitors arrived at the landing page.

Consider the example below:

In this example, everything after “.com” is the UTM. You’ll notice the terms source, medium, and campaign in the string of code. Those are the parameters set for this particular marketing effort.

Source indicates which website or platform the visitor is coming from. In the example, the visitor to the page landed on the website from clicking through in an email campaign.

Medium refers to a specific marketing channel, like social, pay-per-click, and email, and campaign is your internal nomenclature for organizing promotions and other marketing efforts, for example, a Black Friday marketing event.

UTMs Allow You to Optimize Your Marketing

You aren’t limited to source, medium, and campaign—you can also track other parameters, including engagement rate, pages viewed per session, and length of time spent on your website or landing page. You can even A/B test using UTMs, all of which can help you more effectively market your business or service in the future.

Ultimately, UTMs help identify what is working and what is not. By using the data you gather, you can adjust your future marketing efforts to lean into those that are working and change those that aren’t. That could be as simple as spending more of your marketing dollars on email marketing or Facebook. Or it could mean making edits to a landing page that isn’t compelling visitors to take action (fill out a form, donate, etc.) like it should. The more you know about your marketing, the better your marketing can be. UTMs are an essential part of that understanding.

To learn how UTMs can help your business optimize its marketing, reach out to Beam & Hinge today. We’ll be happy to share more insights and walk you through a typical UTM builder.