Are your customers responding well to your email blasts OR How can you measure the success of your online marketing campaigns?
The answer: Google Analytics UTM Tags. These UTM tags or “Urchin Tracking Modules” are necessary for tracking individual marketing campaigns, via the different values you assign them. It can be a challenge to track and measure the success of an email campaign or other online promotion and identify which recipients followed your “instructions”, especially if you are running several at once or your campaigns are across different mediums.
Example: You create an email blast to promote your new website and mail it out to a few hundred people. How do you measure its success? Who’s clicking your email link and who’s simply a new visitor to your site? That’s where the Google Analytic UTM Tags come in to play. UTM tags allow you to add specific extra information at the end of a link and then view this information later as a report in “Traffic Sources”. You’ll be able to see who followed the link on your email blast and measure the success of your campaign. It’s also effective for ePostcards, banner adds, and other online mediums. You’ll need to create a landing page for your campaign, then add UTM Tags to that URL.
Here’s an example of a link with UTM Tags Added:
http://www.yoursite.com/page1.html?utm_source=Partner-Domain &utm_medium=Mailer&utm_campaign=Product
Let’s discuss the required UTM values:
Utm_Source indicates the search engine, email list or domain that is the source of the link.
Utm_medium is what medium you’ve chosen for your campaign, examples being postcards, banner ads, email blasts, etc…
Utm_campaign is the unique name you give your campaign, such as “Fall_Specials” or “Winter_Sale”.
To create your new link, add a “?” to the end of the URL you want to track. Then, add on the other UTM values with “&” between each term. Google Analytics has a UTM URL builder to walk you through this process.
Viewing Your UTM Tag Results:
After you’ve added UTM tags to your links and promoted them, set up a PPC campaign, or emailed them to potential customers, you can log into Google Analytics and view your results. Keep in mind that it may take Google Analytics a few hours to collect the data.
Click on “Traffic Sources” and then view “All Traffic Sources”. Locate your URLs with UTM values, filtering by report information if your website is traffic-heavy. You’ll then be able to see how many individuals clicked a specific link.
Google Analytics UTM tags are a great way to measure the success of an online marketing campaign by allowing you to create unique links. You’re not limited in any way the medium you distribute these links, be it email, banners, ads, and even marketing campaigns that run offline.
If you have any questions about Google Analytics UTM tags, we’d be happy to answer them.