Follow us on Twitter
Grab the RSS feed
The Optimizer’s Guide to Google Adwords: Understanding UTM codes
A common problem with evaluating web traffic sent from advertising, such as Google Adwords, is knowing exactly where traffic is coming from. You often know the referring URL, but you rarely know more than that. It would be helpful to know exactly where people come from, even down to a specific ad or link you’ve published, because that knowledge will help you invest your marketing dollars more wisely in the future. If you know the accurate source of traffic, you can invest more in those sources that work, and less in those that don’t.
For each ad you create in Google Adwords you choose a URL for your advertisement to link to, called a destination URL. In addition to the regular URL, you can also append other information called UTM tags that help you create very specific URLs which you can then track easily as people visit your web site or landing page. So not only will you know that someone clicked on your ad, you’ll know exactly which ad on which platform and as part of which campaign.
Why should I use UTM tags?
If you use Google Analytics in conjunction with Google Adwords, putting UTM tags in your ad URLs can make your reports much more detailed and useful. Properly used UTM tags can tell you which marketing campaigns are successful, which are unsuccessful, and can help you to personalize content. You can create UTM tags to track all sorts information, from marketing campaigns to traffic sources to anything you can think of. Google Adwords also offers an auto-tagging feature that helps avoid manually tagging your links within the Google Adwords system, though you will still have to tag your links from other marketing sources like newsletters. If you truly want to optimize your marketing, getting as much traffic data as possible through the use of UTM codes is paramount.
Here’s an illustration of the value of UTM tags: Let’s say your online business sells homemade soap. You are running a marketing push where you are trying to get people to learn about and buy your soap on your web site. You’ve set up a Google Adwords campaign, you have a mailing list, and you also paid for a few banner ads on Facebook as well as the website of SoapCommunity (the go-to website for people interested in homemade soap). You launch your campaign with two different ads (let’s call them hard-sell and soft-sell) on two different sites. You start getting all sorts of clicks in, but you don’t know which banner ads people are clicking on. Are they clicking on the hard-sell ads in Facebook or the soft-sell ads in SoapCommunity?
The solution? Add UTM tags to your links that distinguish each ad and source from each other and start tracking which part of your campaign is successful.
So what does a URL with UTM tags look like?
- utm_source = the source of the link, like an email list or the search engine where you are running SEM ads.
- utm_medium = the method of delivery used – an email, text ad, or a banner ad, for instance.
- utm_campaign = the way you identify your different marketing campaign and promotions efforts.
There are two additional tags you can use. The tag “utm_term” is used to identify paid keywords when using a pay-per-click advertising solution. “Utm_content” is used when trying to separate two ads based on their design or message.
Getting Started
Use this incredibly helpful URL Builder from Google to generate your links, and then start placing them in your emails, banner ads, and affiliate programs. Once your links are out there, your analytics will start telling you a lot more about where traffic is really coming from and who is converting. Knowing this data will help you improve your long-term marketing campaigns because you’ll know which ones are working and which ones are not.
Did you like that post? You'll love these.