Increased ROI and Better Customer Engagement - the Power of UTM Tracking
We know that when you are scaling a product business, the ability to effectively track and analyse key performance data can make a huge difference in the success and sustainability of your business. We all know that data is king, and let’s face it, we also know that it’s rare for the data from various platforms to match up and that GDPR and tracking data exclusions mean that the holes we’re faced with are many and potentially large!
One simple tactic we always apply and recommend is using UTM parameters across your company communications. UTM stands for ‘Urchin Tracking Modules’ (catchy?), but simply put, it’s just a way of organising the links that you send people when you communicate so that you can track performance. The UTM is a tag that you add manually to the URL that you are sending people to. This tagging will enable you to use Google Analytics to identify the specific sources, mediums, and campaigns that drive traffic to your website, providing invaluable data for analysing and optimising your marketing efforts.
So why do we want this info?
Several reasons, all of which revolve around getting the insights that will help make decisions and drive better results, for example:
Measuring Marketing Effectiveness. UTMs allow us to accurately measure the effectiveness of each campaign by channel. By using UTM’s on the links being used by ads, emails, social media posts, or other marketing materials, we can track which channels drive the most traffic, leads, and conversions.
Attribution Analysis. We know each of the platforms wants to take the glory for the final sale, but UTMs can help cut through this to understand what each channel contributes.
Optimise Campaign Performance. UTM data gives us extra engagement data on the campaigns or ads performing well and the underperformers, so supporting data to make adjustments to ad creatives, targeting parameters, or budget allocations.
Personalised User Experience. UTM tracking allows businesses to deliver a more personalised user experience based on where the traffic is coming from. So, for example, if you can clearly see that all traffic to a certain page is coming from an affiliate, you can tailor landing pages and messaging to better resonate with their audience's interests and preferences, leading to higher engagement and conversion rates.
Budget Allocation. UTM tracking helps us make the all-important data-driven decisions about budget allocation by identifying which marketing channels or campaigns deliver the best ROI. By reallocating resources to the most effective channels, we help maximise the impact of the marketing spend and achieve better overall results.
Refine Targeting: Through Google Analytics, UTMs provide extra insight into the demographics, behaviours, and interests of the audience by channel. So, from this, we can refine targeting parameters for future campaigns and keep things as tight and relevant as possible within receptive audience segments.
How to set up UTMs for your business
The best part - it’s free! In a world where all the tech stack comes at a cost, we love the fact that Google Analytics is available to all for free - so why wouldn’t you? Third-party tools can also track the UTMs; you just might need to integrate and enable them.
Then, to add UTMs to your company communications, it’s more about organising, defining and rolling out the process you will use. Google has a free UTM builder that you can use to generate a UTM link every time you need one. However, we have our own tried and tested template that will generate the UTM and also serve as a record of the ones that have been used - very useful!
This set-up also encourages keeping the ‘campaign’ level focused on a single product, service or category - keeping the number of ‘campaigns’ streamlined will help keep things nice and clean and easy to segment and analyse. Consistency in naming conventions is gold, and our template is accessible below for you to get started!
In essence, UTM tracking provides a means for businesses to measure, analyse, and optimise their marketing efforts. Having a greater understanding of the sources, channels and campaigns that are leveraging the highest levels of engagement and ROI can positively influence the decisions made on everything from campaign spend and creative to the layout of your landing pages and assets. Using the data to make these decisions will help growth by driving better ROI and increased customer engagement. What’s not to love? Download the template today and let us know how you get on and how you are using your UTM’s.