Before calling yourself a "data-driven marketer", you should be sure you know exactly what part of your campaign works well. Moreover, you have to know what part of that part brings some real results.
For example, you see that your Twitter account gets a decent number of engagements and impressions, so you are sure to state that Twitter is an effective source of traffic. Yeah, totes. But what if I told you that it can be your recent retweet or reply that provides you with most views? In that case, Twitter performance converts to pretty much no traffic to your website.
The good news are you can track the traffic much more precisely you think. Let's start from the basics.
What exactly is this UTM?
The abbreviation stands for Urchin Tracking Module and basically is a couple of tags attached to your URL. Adding these tags allows you to monitor not only the source of traffic, but also specific data like campaigns and posts. You guessed it, the conjectures are over!
A proper UTM tag includes 6 elements. Three of them are necessary, two of them - optional, but keep in mind the fact the more specific you are while creating a UTM, the less effort it is needed when analyzing them.
So here's the structure of UTM:
- URL. The address of the destination where you want your audience to appear.
- Campaign Name. The reason why your prospects are there. A product or offering you are informing people about.
- Campaign Source. The platform you use to deliver the message, such as Google, Facebook, or Twitter. It is very likely to be the platform you use to create a medium.
- Campaign Medium. The form of the message. It allows you to track the type of traffic, whether it is an email, banner ad, or a social media post.
- Campaign Term. This one is optional, but not less important. It allows you to monitor the performance of a particular keyword.
- Campaign Content. It is optional too, but it makes your navigation when analyzing much easier. It is especially useful when you post different mediums on the same channel.
How do you use UTM?
Once you know the structure and basic principles of how UTM works, it's time to figure out why do you need them.
There are several situations UTM will give you much more insights on effectiveness of your particular activity. Here are some of them:
- A/B testing. There is no easier way to figure out which option of digital ad, or social media post is performing better. Just create a unique link to each option, and enjoy ourself.
- Display ads. Despite the fact this type of advertisements are not as popular as before, it is a great way to raise brand awareness. Using UTMs will give you much more precise metrics than shady CTRs and impressions.
- Social media marketing. Just like in every previous case, it is much easier to track what post converted most traffic with UTMs, as engagement with posts is almost never equal to the actual traffic they created.
- Messaging scripts. Building unique links using UTM services will allow you to know which CTA worked best, so you will be able to create the most effective messages. You can find more information about our approach to creating messaging sequences in our Lead Generation Case Study.
- Influencer marketing. Once you have found a blogger to promote your company - the most tricky thing is to evaluate actual use of their activity. Using this tracking technique would be the ultimate KPI for this type of promotion, as you would be able to track all the incoming traffic.
Now, when you are aware of such an effective analytics tool, you have all chances of becoming a marketing Agent 007.
Just be sure to use it continuously, and there will be no more guessing about which your action performed best. You will know it exactly!