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To truly understand what makes a marketing campaign successful, it’s crucial to be able to track and analyze its performance. This is where UTM codes come into play.
UTM codes are added to the end of any URL to track clicks and the performance of marketing activities. UTM tracking does not tell the full story, but a fuller picture emerges when combined with site tagging and conversion pixels. This enables marketers to measure and attribute success to specific marketing efforts accurately.
In this article, we’ll review UTM codes and how to use them to track marketing performance.
UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) codes are snippets of text that can be appended to URLs to track different parameters of site traffic. These codes tell Google Analytics, and other analytics tools, more information about the web traffic source.
The term “Urchin Tracking Module” came from Urchin Tracker, a web analytics software that was the base for Google Analytics.
At a high level, UTM codes help advertisers answer three important questions:
To answer those questions, there’s a specific code attached to a website’s URL, which looks something like this:
The code itself has two components:
UTM parameters are short lines of text added to the end of your URLs (or links) to track your website’s or marketing channels’ performance.
You can track five UTM parameters, although the first three (Source, Medium, and Campaign) are the most commonly used:
This identifies your traffic source, such as a specific social media platform or website. If the traffic came from Facebook, it would be written as “utm_source=facebook.”
This is the most-used option and tracks the content type or marketing medium that brought visitors to your site, like social media, email, or organic search.
Example: utm_medium=social
A parameter that allows tracking site traffic sourced from specific ad campaigns. This is helpful when multiple initiatives are live simultaneously and typically aligns with the campaign theme.
Example: utm_campaign=summer-sale
This is useful when multiple links point to the same URL, as it can help differentiate between creative messages or ad content.
Each version can be assigned a unique click-through URL where UTM Content identifies the creative message if a single campaign rotates multiple ads.
Example:
For advertisers running paid search campaigns, this category isolates the specific keywords or search terms that triggered the ad and drove the most site traffic and conversions.
Example: utm_term=seo
Advertisers can use this information to create targeted audience segments based on custom keyword sets, allowing for better ad targeting and audience construction.
Your marketing strategy needs a well-rounded strategy to attract & convert leads. Our experts can craft the strategy tailored specifically to you.
UTM codes help your analytics tools track your visitor’s source to define where your traffic comes from.
You can also use them to:
And in an increasingly cookieless advertising world, advertisers are turning to UTM codes more than ever. UTM codes provide more than just source tracking and campaign performance; they serve as site events to build First-Party audience segments and enhance retargeting capabilities. We’ll review this in more detail in our Advanced UTM Tracking Strategies.
While UTM codes provide valuable traffic insights, they don’t show the full customer journey.
If a visitor comes from your site from a different source, for example, word-of-mouth, the UTM tag won’t accurately reflect the traffic’s source creating false attribution.
🛑 What are the limitations of UTM tagging? 🛑
“Site attribution from programmatic advertising campaigns is heavily post-view attribution, which means campaigns are measured based on user actions after viewing an ad rather than solely on click-through rates.
UTMs are only triggered when a user clicks an ad. This means UTMs aren’t always a reliable data source for telling the full story of how users get to your site.”
–Jessica Ostrom, Director of Account Management, KORTX
UTM codes and Google Analytics offer insights into user clicks and the user’s site journey but do not explain the complete marketing narrative of how users arrived at your site.
❓ What tools or other tracking methods can advertisers complement UTM codes?
“This is where site tagging with conversion pixels come in. This helps ensure your marketing campaigns are set up to track post-view attribution so you’re not missing out on that key piece of the puzzle.”
–Jessica Ostrom, Director of Account Management, KORTX
📚 Related Article: How Site Tagging Can Make or Break Your Audience Strategy
Read more about the important role of site tagging and implementation in driving a successful audience strategy and measuring campaign success.
Here’s a breakdown of how you can use UTM links in your day-to-day marketing activities:
Whether you’re launching a new product or running a discount campaign, UTM codes can help you track the effectiveness of your promotional efforts. By appending UTM parameters to your campaign URLs, you can monitor and analyze the traffic generated from different sources.
Example:
Instagram Discount Campaign: yoursite.com/sale?utm_campaign=20_off&utm_medium=paid&utm_source=instagram&utm_content=bio
Create separate UTM campaigns to gauge the impact of your organic social media efforts versus your followers’ promotional efforts. Share your content using a UTM link for your posts, and encourage your followers to share the same content using a different UTM link.
Example:
In-house Social Campaign: yoursite.com?utm_campaign=inhouse_social&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&utm_content=post
Follower Promotion: yoursite.com?utm_campaign=followers&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&utm_content=post
If you engage in guest posting on industry websites, you’ll want to assess whether these posts actually drive traffic to your site. Include UTM parameters in the links within your guest posts to track the referral source.
Example:
Guest Post: yoursite.com?utm_campaign=guest_post&utm_medium=paid&utm_source=guest_post_site&utm_content=body
Utilize different UTM codes for the same content across various platforms to understand which channels drive the most engagement. Focus on tracking the medium, source, and content parameters.
Example:
LinkedIn: yoursite.com/my-content?utm_medium=social&utm_source=linkedin&utm_content=caption
Instagram: yoursite.com/my-content?utm_medium=social&utm_source=instagram&utm_content=description
TikTok: yoursite.com/my-content?utm_medium=social&utm_source=tiktok&utm_content=caption
Determine how successful your internal linking strategy is by adding UTM parameters to track where users click within your blog posts. Use this strategy selectively to avoid confusion with search engines.
Example:
Image: yoursite.com/my-content?utm_source=blog&utm_content=image
Above the Fold: yoursite.com/my-content?utm_source=blog&utm_content=above_the_fold
Bottom of the Post: yoursite.com/my-content?utm_source=blog&utm_content=bottom
These are just a few basic use cases for UTM tracking URLs. Below we’ll get into more advanced strategies for implementing UTM tracking here at KORTX.
Beyond basic source tracking, UTM codes are a powerful tool for building First-Party audience segments.
At KORTX, we use Axon Audience Manager to optimize campaign performance for our clients. Axon includes custom First-Party audience construction supplemented with Third-Party data.
Using all five UTM code parameters, Axon opens up an avenue for advanced audience segmentation and insights.
We’ve outlined some recommended strategies to help advertisers maximize UTM codes for audience targeting:
Advertisers targeting niche audiences in specific industries often resort to expensive trade journals and industry publications, which charge higher CPMs (Cost Per Thousand) than programmatic rates.
While this is critical to reaching potential customers in the context of their industry, audience reach is typically limited, and moving these prospects down the purchase funnel is lengthy and costly.
Challenge: Expensive and niche Second-Party audiences can be identified with the UTM Source parameter when they reach a client’s site.
Solution: Convert feasible traffic into First-Party audiences and retarget them cost-effectively across digital endpoints.
Results: KORTX implemented this strategy for a CPG client, targeting niche prospects at a $23.00 CPM. The converted Axon First-Party segments from the UTM codes were activated at a $4.75 CPM.
Paid Search and Paid Social campaigns are often a user’s first digital brand touchpoint. However, each tactic operates at different points in the purchase funnel.
Search is an effective lower-funnel conversion strategy, while Social excels at reach and upper-funnel awareness.
The UTM Medium parameter confirms which users have interacted with Search and Social messaging to determine the next creative sequence to drive toward a purchase or conversion.
Challenge: Accurately capturing and analyzing user behavior and engagement based on UTM parameters.
Solution: Axon Audience Manager captures UTM Medium for Search and Social, while providing real-time audience counts for precise targeting.
Results: Our strategy team analyzes opportunities to sequence Social audiences and assess user intent based on Search behavior.
CRM (Customer Relationship Management) lists and site visitors are an advertiser’s most valuable data asset. Sophisticated marketers often have multiple CRM lists that categorize customers based on their engagement level with the brand.
In this case, it’s critical to understand how each CRM list performs and which creative messages resonate the best. By assigning the UTM Content parameter to unique creative for each CRM list, advertisers can gather scale and performance data to maximize their CRM value.
Challenge: KORTX partnered with a retail chain with four CRM lists reflecting different engagement levels in online shopping.
Solution: Our clients can onboard CRM lists into Axon. Unique UTM Content parameters are assigned to each list, offering performance and scale insights.
Results: UTM content breakouts tracked performance and informed creative recommendations for maximizing ROAS.
Moving audiences between digital channels was previously a complex process that required multiple campaigns and manually shifting data segments.
However, UTM codes allow easy audience segmentation based on traffic source and activating new First-Party audiences across digital end-points. Tracking UTM Medium and Source parameters helps understand ad exposure history and route audiences to unexposed digital channels.
Challenge: Moving audiences between digital channels.
Solution: Adjusting between Display and Video based on prior ad exposure enables frequency control for advertisers with diverse media mixes.
Results: Clients benefit from improved audience segmentation, ad frequency control, and campaign performance optimization across multiple channels and sources.
The most direct and effective application of UTM codes involves segmenting users based on their current purchase funnel stage.
Insights can be applied to advertising tactics aligned with the funnel, extracting details about pushing upper-funnel audiences (Pre-Roll, CTV, Social) into lower-funnel tactics (Display, Search, Native).
Challenge: Capturing and analyzing UTM events across all five parameters in real-time.
Solution: Once the Axon JavaScript code is live on a client’s site, UTM events are captured, First-Party audiences are built, and insights from analyzing UTM Medium and Content help optimize campaigns based on funnel position.
Results: Enhanced campaign optimization based on user exposure and funnel position.
We recommend considering a few best practices before adding UTM codes to your marketing campaigns.
Use standardized naming conventions for UTM parameters across your campaigns to ensure consistency and easier data analysis.
Choose clear and descriptive values for each UTM parameter to accurately represent the source, medium, campaign, content, and term. This will help you identify and analyze different aspects of your campaigns.
Set up rules before using UTMs. Will you use underscores or dashes in the campaign name (summer-sale vs summer_sale)? Will all links use only lowercase (Summer-Sale vs summer-sale)?
💡 We recommend using all lowercase in UTM links to avoid any case-sensitivity issues that might affect tracking accuracy.
Avoid using long and complex UTM codes. Keep them concise and straightforward for better readability and ease of use.
✅ Easy to read: https://www.yoursite.com/offers/?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=Display&utm_campaign=SummerDeals
❌ Difficult to read: https://www.yoursite.com/offers/?utm_source=MarketingEmail&utm_medium=_campaign_
ABC123&utm_term=Retargeting&utm_campaign=_campaign_ABC123
Try to limit multiple parameter usage to the data that provide the most relevant insights for your tracking purposes. Too many parameters can make URLs longer and more complex.
Special characters and spaces can cause problems with URL formatting and tracking. Instead, use a percentage sign (%) followed by the corresponding character code if necessary.
Before implementing UTM codes in your campaigns, test the URLs to make sure they work properly.
To test, enter the UTM-tagged URL into your browser’s address bar and see what happens.
If the URL redirects to the non-UTM-coded site, your UTM isn’t working. If the UTM parameters remain at the end of the URL, then your UTM is likely working.
An example of a UTM code that isn’t working. Notice how the URL redirects to the plain URL without the code.
An example of a working UTM code. The URL doesn’t redirect and keeps the UTM parameters when you visit the website.
Maintain a central repository or spreadsheet to document the UTM codes used in each campaign.
Although Google Analytics offers acquisition reporting, having redundancy in your tracking is always a good idea. A simple Excel or Google Sheet should do the trick.
As the advertising landscape becomes increasingly cookieless, UTM codes play a vital role in providing First-Party audience insights and enhancing retargeting capabilities.
UTM codes, combined with other tracking methods and tools, can provide valuable insights, optimize campaign performance, and enable more personalized marketing strategies.
Discover the untapped potential of your UTM codes and transform them into actionable data segments.
Axon Audience Manager empowers you to understand your audience better, drive personalization, and optimize campaign performance.
Corey Rice is the Director of Strategy at KORTX and has nearly 18 years of digital marketing experience. Prior to joining KORTX he has worked at agencies, publishers, and tech companies in San Francisco and Detroit.
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