What are UTM Codes in Digital Marketing & How To Use It? (Free Template)

Do you know using UTM tags will make you a better digital marketer?

If you do not understand what UTM tags are, read on to learn more…

The most important aspect of digital marketing is being able to remain your customers satisfied with your services and track which marketing effort is driving traffic and sales.

Maintaining their satisfaction levels is an easy task once you have the proper survey campaign management tools, but tracking the most successful channels can be a little tricky (if you don’t resort to the proper solutions of course).

Let’s think of this scenario: You may drive traffic to your blog or business website via:

And various other means…

But how do you know which of these efforts is helping you drive maximum traffic, and which one of them is converting into sales or more engagement?

Well, this is what using UTM tags could do for you.

Consider another scenario, as a business you may run a different campaign at different points in time (ex: Social media marketing with Vendor1 in Quarter 1, Social media marketing campaign with Vendor#2 in Q3),

how do you check the effectiveness of these vendors?

Well, the answer to this question is again UTM tags.

The best part, after a little practice you could master the art of using UTM tags.

It does not matter which stage of digital marketing you are in, UTM tags are one of those things that you should learn about and implement in your business or client business.

Well, today you are in luck, as this guide will teach you everything about UTM tags that you should know about.

So grab a cup of coffee☕️, and read on to learn about UTM codes.

What are UTM codes?

UTM codes (also called as UTM tags or UTM tracking codes) are the snippet of text added as a suffix (end of the URL) to be able to track the source of traffic.

UTM stands for “Urchin Traffic Monitor“. This name comes from Urchin Tracker, a web analytics software that served as the base for Google Analytics.

A lot of tools like Google Analytics, HubSpot by default show you the traffic source, but using UTM tags you should be able to pinpoint which specific campaign, posts are driving traffic, or sales for your online business.

Example of UTM code:

Here is how a UTM code looks like:

https://shoutmeloud.com/?utm_source=socialmedia&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=blackfriday

There are four form field shown in the above field, and you have more options than we will discuss in the further section of this guide.

In the above example, these are the three form field:

• Campaign URL: https://www.shoutmeloud.com (This could be any URL)
• Campaign source: social media
• Campaign medium: twitter
• Campaign name: blackfriday

If you have understood this, now we can move on to the further section of UTM tracking codes.

Getting started with UTM tracking code for your business?

Setting up a UTM naming convention for your business is the first thing you should be doing. This could be done on a spreadsheet, and from here on, anyone who is working on your online business will use the UTM tracking naming convention document for running any campaign.

Even if it’s only you who is working on your business marketing (ex: Social media, email marketing), you should have this document from day one. This would make your life easier, as you move ahead in your online business.

To get started, you need a template like this (Credit: 3whitehats)

From here on, you should be using this sheet to create UTM codes for the various campaigns you run.

Some of the places where you could quickly integrate UTM codes are:

• Your Email marketing sequence
• Your Ad Campaigns
• Your social media profile bio
• Your Social media updates

Once you are done setting up UTM tags, you will be able to measure the traffic in your traffic analytic software like Google analytics or any other.

I’m not getting in-depth of UTM tags implementation and analyzing the traffic using UTM tags in this guide. My intention is to introduce you to one important aspect of digital marketing.

Over to you:

How are you using UTM tags in your digital marketing campaigns? What are some of the easy wins one could expect after using UTM tags? Let us know in the comment section below.