How To Track Your Marketing Campaigns
UTM stands for Urchin Tracking Module, because an early version of Google's campaign tracking program was called Urchin. UTM tags allow you to add additional information to the links that you create. This allows you to see the information in Google Analytics under traffic sources, which in turn allows you to track the success and impact of all of your various campaigns (using unique links for different campaigns). These links can be distributed via email, banner ad, affiliate program, or even offline marketing campaign if you use a URL shortener tool.
A Link with UTM Tags Added:
http://www.domain.com/page.html?utm_source=value1&utm_medium=value2&utm_campaign=value3&utm_term=value4&utm_content=value5
Required UTM Values explained:
utm_source= value1: "value1" will be the source of the link, for example, the name of your email list, or another domain on which the link is placed.
utm_medium=value2: "value2" is the method of delivery, for instance, postcard, email, banner adutm_campaign=value3: "value3" is a name that helps you keep track of your different campaign efforts, for example, date of the email, or the name of the holiday for the marketing effort.
Optional UTM Values:
utm_term=value4: This is a used to identify paid keywords in an AdWords campaign
utm_content=value5: This is an optional field to help you more easily identify the marketing effort, for instance, what the article or email, is about that you are tracking.
To create the URL just add a "?" at the end of the URL and then an "&" between each one of the terms. With a little practice, you will be able to create the URLs without help, but Google has a UTM URL Tool to do it for you. Keep track of the terms you use, for consistency.
To see your results, log in to your Google Analytics account. Go to Traffic Sources, then All Traffic Sources. After you locate the results, you will see the UTM values you entered for the Source and Medium. The reports can be filtered to see the other UTM values that you added to your links.
