So you’ve started planning your multi-channel master class, and now you’ve moved onto pixels, cookies, and trying to conquerUTMs. Well, let’s break down all of these tracking techniques and look at how we can use them.

What is a UTM?

A UTM is a website URL that contains a specific bit of text at the end. This is used by Google Analytics to identify the source of a referring click and traffic, but also can be used to capture the specific source a lead has come from.

UTMs look a bit like this

https://stickyclick.co.uk/pixels-cookies-and-utms?utm_source=LinkedIn&utm_medium=Paid&utm_campaign=UTM-content-1967A_LI-paid_US&utm_term=US

Let’s break this down:

• Source: This is telling us that the click has come from LinkedIn
• Medium: We can see here that this person has come from a paid-for campaign
• Campaign: This shows us that the campaign this is part of is from our UTM-content-1967A campaign. In this case, we use a number reference to identify a specific piece of artwork in our LinkedIn campaign. That way – we can see which artwork, works the best!

How to benefit from using UTMs

UTMs are great at seeing where your traffic has come from. You’ll need to build up your UTM like the above, and use this as the link you provide to your digital advertising platform, against ad groups or specific sets of artwork. That way, when looking at Google Analytics, you’ll see which UTMs drove the most traffic.

Want to see a specific UTM against a lead?

This is best the best way of using UTMs – integrating your marketing platform or website, in a way that will capture the UTM of your campaign. Marketo, Hubspot, Pardot and Eloqua all have options to do this, but you can also achieve the same result directly through Wordpress. You’ll want to capture the UTM into the form when your contact fills it in. This could be a purchase basket, a white paper a demo request or just a simple contact form. That way, once completed you’ll receive the lead, along with details of the UTM they found you via.

You can capture every part of a UTM – so that’s the Source, Medium, Campaign, and Term. You’re better off though just taking one. For example looking at the above, capturing the Campaign UTM will show us against the specific lead which campaign drove them to our website, along with the specific ID of the ad.