UTM parameters are a great way to gain insight into how visitors find and engage with your website. It works by allowing you to add additional information to a website URL. When a user clicks on that URL, the additional information is then picked up by the website, including any analytics where it can then be used.
Imagine you want to run some paid adverts. You want the traffic to come to the same page, but you need a way to tell which advert each visitor is clicking on. By adding different UTM parameters to the advert URLs, you can now tell which visitors are coming from each advert.
Another good use case is where you want to run a marketing campaign across a variety of websites. By using the UTM variables, you can group traffic from all the different sources so you can see how well your overall campaign is performing.
How to use UTM parameters
UTM parameters use part of the URL called a query string. This is the bit that comes after the question mark in a URL. The query string is a collection of keys and values. The keys are known as query string variables, and the values are the data we want to assign to those variables.
UTM parameters are a selection of specific variables we can add to the query string of a URL. The most common of there are:
- utm_source
- utm_medium
- utm_campaign
- utm_term
Lets start with the URL of the page. In this example, I’ll just use the homepage of my website:
https://www.davidrossdigital.com/Next we need to add a question mark. This marks the end of the page URL and the beginning of the query string:
https://www.davidrossdigital.com/?We can add the different variables in any order, so lets start with the source. In this example, the link will be going on a LinkedIn advert, so we need to add the utm_source variable with a value of linkedin:
https://www.davidrossdigital.com/?utm_source=linkedinNow I’ve already got links on my LinkedIn account, so I want to make it clear this link is used in a Pay Per Click advert. I can use the utm_medium variable for this, with a value of PPC. When adding multiple variables like this, we need to seperate them with the & sign:
https://www.davidrossdigital.com/?utm_source=linkedin&utm_medium=ppcImagine there is snow on the ground, and that this advert is part of a Christmas campaign. I could add that information using the utm_campaign variable. Like before, we need an & between this variable and the previous variable:
https://www.davidrossdigital.com/?utm_source=linkedin&utm_medium=ppc&utm_campaign=christmasLastly, lets imagine that I’m running a similar advert on Facebook. I could use a very similar set of variables, changing the utm_source accordingly:
https://www.davidrossdigital.com/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=ppc&utm_campaign=christmasWhere does this data show up?
There are a number of ways you can make use of UTM parameters, but the most common is through your website analytics. Each analytics provider will work slightly differently, but they should allow you segment your traffic data, so you can focus on just those visits where the utm_medium variable was set to ppc, or the utm_campaign variable was set to Christmas.