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BlogBridging commentary on the art & science of content; content marketing, branded content, native advertising and the analytics, attribution and intelligence that powers it.
Marketers use UTM parameters to help them see how engaging different traffic sources are. They let them unpack a traffic source from just say ‘Facebook’ to ‘Facebook Campaign 1’ and ‘Ad Creative 1, 2 & 3’. They can use this fidelity to see how each has performed and make adjustments accordingly. It’s also a bit of an insurance policy, you may not know what you need to improve over time. But if you have set up UTM parameters at the… Continue reading
Go to a new device, click on the links, and see if the data shows up in your analytics system. You may want to edit the UTM parameter to show it is a test. That way, you can check that it is working and maintain data integrity for your analytics. Continue reading
The parameters are placed on the end of a website URL. When the user clicks that URL, the browser, seeks the web server that hosts that content, requests the URL, including the parameter. This is then logged by the web server. When the page is rendered by the browser, the parameter is also picked up by the analytics on that page. This then tells the analytics system, the extra information in the parameter. And it can store and analyze it… Continue reading
You don’t have to use UTM parameters all the time and everywhere. But it is helpful to get greater granularity on how different activities are driving customer engagement. And if that is valuable to you, then you should use them. It is worth considering, that sometimes you aren’t going to act on this data, or the size of the initiative doesn’t warrant it. But given the ease of adding UTM parameters, you may as well. Its like insurance, for future… Continue reading
UTM parameters are not often used for SEO. It is better for websites to link directly to the content. You should make sure that UTM parameters aren’t in the canonical URL. As many browsers and analytics use that for other functions. Such as to check social preview images, to generate share URLs. There is a risk that you fragment your SEO between different unique URLs, whereas a canonical URL helps address this problem. Continue reading
You should use UTM parameters when you want to get greater granularity around various traffic sources driving to a destination. This enables your team to get a better idea of how each traffic source is working for you. When you use an analytics system like Nudge, you can see how engaging each of those traffic sources are. And to then optimize to quality. For example if one source, drives traffic at 30 seconds of attention and another at 20 seconds,… Continue reading
Creating UTM parameters for Facebook ads enables you to get more granularity on the performance of how various PPC strategies are working. Seeing what campaigns are driving customer engagement, ad copy, and audiences. Without UTM parameters you would be operating blind. It is also fair to consider, are my efforts on Facebook large enough, to warrant these types of optimizations. In general you want to capture the data though, so in the future, you can use it to benchmark other… Continue reading
It makes sense to use UTM parameters when you are sharing or promoting URLS. This may be to internal social pages, to partners, or other advertising platforms. This then enables you to see the performance of these traffic sources in your own analytics. Thus helping show the ROI of the various traffic sources. And provide a basis for finding areas of improvement. Generally it doesn’t make sense to use UTM parameters for internal clicks, within a website. As the user… Continue reading
To track UTM parameters on clicks between two domains, you need to simply append the parameters to each click. Then the destination website will detect. In some cases parameters will not pass through, for example if a user shares a URL on their phone. Or some browsers will reduce the parameters being passed over, to protect privacy. This encourages marketers to only use what is necessary. Continue reading
UTM parameters, are instructions placed at the end of a URL, to pass information from one place to another. The user activates these parameters when they click on them, and this data is passed to the destination website. It was born out of a need, to identify different traffic sources. And to enable marketers to get granularity in their traffic data. These days it is used as a blanket term for any parameters attached to a URL. However UTM does… Continue reading