marketing campaigns

How to Use UTM Parameters to Track Your Website Traffic

Learning to monitor your site using UTM code can help you understand how your visitors react.

Daniel Alcanja

Daniel Alcanja

— 6 min read
How to Use UTM Parameters to Track Your Website Traffic

You must learn to use UTM parameters to track your website traffic, especially your marketing campaigns. With them, you can replace sketchy metrics such as clicks and impressions with essential performance data.

When you tag the URLs using the Urchin Tracking Module (UTMs), you can better understand how your visitors interact with your site. For this reason, it is essential to know how to add the UTM codes to track everything.

What Are UTM Parameters?

UTM parameters are five tags you add to the end of your URL.

The fantastic thing is that you can use them alongside any analytics platform, such as Google Analytics. With it, you can track how your users behave after they click on one of your links.

Here is an example of how a UTM parameter looks like at the end of the URL:

https://www.microapp.io/?utm_source=LinkedIn&utm_medium=Social&utm_campaign=Campaign&utm_content=Content

The above snippet tells you what you can track in your next section. Still, UTM parameters stick to your links and are stubborn entities even if you switch to a different medium or network.

But what does this mean? This means that when a visitor picks up a link you tagged with a UTM, for example, from Instagram, and shares it on Facebook, every person clicking on your link will count as a share from Instagram.

How You Can Use The 5 UTM Tags

  • The Source shows what site your visitors are coming from.
  • The Medium will show which channels bring visitors to your website, from emails, social media, or cost-per-click.
  • The Campaign helps you identify what campaign or promotion it is connected with.
  • The Term will identify the paid keywords you want to target in your campaign.
  • Lastly, the Content helps to identify an exact element on your promotion or add clicked.

What Makes UTM Codes Important?

Combining the five tags can help you develop valuable insights about your promotional efforts and whether they bring in traffic.

This will allow you to see which campaigns are working and which are not performing as expected.

In turn, gathering the data about the working campaigns or promotions will open the door to more experimentation and optimization.

Hence, you can use UTM codes in your messaging, emails, or social campaigns to help you determine what channels work the best for buyers and your current site audience.

You can use the content that performs well in your other promotions and campaigns, positively impacting your ROI.

What Tools Help to Generate and Track UTM Parameters?

Different tools are available for building and tracking UTM codes. Our tool, UTM Generator, can help you generate links with the UTM parameter.

Furthermore, it is best to use a tracking URL to direct traffic to your landing page from anywhere other than a call-to-action button on your website.

The information is sent to your traffic analytics report like Google Analytics. 

6 Best Practices Using UTM Parameters

Using UTM codes helps you follow some best practices, improving the effectiveness and accuracy of your UTM tracking report.

1. Create Standard Names

UTM codes can become complex fast, but you can avoid confusion to ensure your UTMs are reportable by keeping the naming patterns consistent.

It helps to remain consistent using lowercase throughout your campaigns, for example:

utm_source=Facebook is different from utm_source=facebook

The reason is that changing from an upper case to a camel case becomes difficult to remember. Also, keep your URLs neat, non-redundant, descriptive, and easy to read.

So, make sure that your UTMs flow and are easy to decipher. Check out our detailed guide for more information on achieving this when using our microapp tool.

The next step in using your UTM parameters effectively is to keep a record of your tagged links so that they remain on the same page as a marketing team.

You can use a spreadsheet template for free. It also helps to create a naming convention guide that outlines the instructions for tagging links.

You can expand the guide by adding new scenarios.

3. Connect Your Tracking Data to Your UTM System

It is not always about the number of clicks or the traffic generated by different sources that count for your business but the revenue you make.

So, once you know how to use the UTM parameter to track your website traffic, it will help you connect your tracking data with a CRM. You will get a clear picture of how your different online marketing channels affect the bottom line.

You can also set goals within GA. For instance, you can use a platform like Google Analytics to measure your reading engagement and loyalty.

We recommend not getting carried away with URLs with UTM codes, especially when copying and pasting them.

You can easily copy links from your content that include UTM codes and post them elsewhere, which can cause havoc with UTM tracking.

So, if you use UTM codes, ensure they are free of tracking codes before pasting them.

Only use UTM parameters on your external links to point to your site. Once your visitors arrive on your site, you need not alter the platform to which they are referred. If you add them to internal links, it can cause many problems:

  • Every time a code is recognized, the sessions become inflated as it triggers new sessions the whole time.
  • You end up misattributing your conversions resulting from an unclear external source.
  • You end up with dozens of sessions that provide no action, and the bounce rate increases.

You need not use UTM codes on your internal links. Instead, you can use a tool like Google Analytics to help track your users' flow once they arrive on your site.

You can find it in the Audience tab or create specific events using a tag manager to help record when a user takes action.

You must keep track of the UTM links you create in a spreadsheet, noting who built them and when.

This will help inform your team about whom to chat with when questions arise. Our microapp tool also includes a section for adding a campaign ID.

Where Can You Use UTM Parameters?

Here we have some UTM parameter use cases to help you implement them now:

Social Media

Google Analytics reports traffic from different social networks. However, unless you add UTM codes, you cannot distinguish the visitors who click on links in your status updates, profile, or ads.

For example, you should know which social media platform yields the highest ROI and which links work best. A UTM code in a link can help you analyze this for platforms like Facebook, X, and more.

  • URL: https://www.microapp.io/blog-post
  • UTM Source: facebook
  • UTM Medium: social
  • UTM Campaign: industry-insights

Email Marketing

You can do the same if you want to understand the parameters of your newsletter and determine whether it brings the most traffic to your site. You can even implement your UTM parameters within your email signature to help keep track of lead visitors to your site.

  • URL: https://www.microapp.io/demo-request
  • UTM Source: email
  • UTM Medium: newsletter
  • UTM Campaign: product-demo

PPC

Using paid-per-click marketing, you can add UTM codes to your banner ads as they perform the best. For instance, you may have two banner sizes on a third-party website, and once you tag them both, you can determine which one is more effective.

  • URL: https://www.microapp.io/software-solution
  • UTM Source: google
  • UTM Medium: cpc
  • UTM Campaign: B2B-software-promo

Local SEO

Another great way to determine if your Google My Business profile generates traffic is to use UTM codes on your profile link.

  • URL: https://www.microapp.io/local-offers
  • UTM Source: google-my-business
  • UTM Medium: organic
  • UTM Campaign: local-listing

Influencer Marketing

This is one of the most challenging things to measure, but UTM parameters can make it happen. If you use influencers to help promote your services or products on social media and more, you can provide them with a personalized UTM code link to determine how much traffic they drive and how many convert.

  • URL: https://www.microapp.io/ebook-download
  • UTM Source: influencer
  • UTM Medium: social
  • UTM Campaign: industry-expert-promo

Wrap-UP: Start Using UTM Codes Today

UTM parameters are one of the simplest ways to generate more data about your website, especially for marketing campaigns.

Establishing naming patterns and creating a strategy around UTM generation takes little work.

Before you know it, you can generate UTM codes using our microapp, and it will become second nature to boost your marketing.

Read more