You’ve got your campaign set up and ready to go; now you just need to figure out how you’ll measure its performance.

How will you tell whether your website’s traffic is purchased or organic? Is email a better revenue-generating channel than social media? Which version of the same ad is the most successful if you’re running multiple versions?

UTM parameters can be used to track all of these characteristics and more.

UTM parameters are a straightforward, simple, and reliable technique to track online traffic. Changes to third-party cookies or the Facebook pixel do not affect them. They also use Google Analytics.

UTM codes should be an important component of your marketing toolset if you’re sending any traffic to your website from your social media accounts.

UTM tags have three major advantages:

1. They assist you in tracking the effectiveness of social marketing initiatives and campaigns and calculating ROI.
2. They provide precise conversion and traffic source information.
3. They enable you to compare and contrast individual postings in the traditional A/B testing method.

What are UTM parameters?

UTM parameters are simple pieces of code that you may add to URLs, such as the ones you share on social media. They offer details about the link’s location and purpose, making tracking clicks and traffic from a given social media post or campaign easier.

Although this may appear to be a complex term, UTM parameters are fairly simple and straightforward to utilise.

How do I measure the effectiveness of my campaigns?

You can see the data in Google Analytics once your tagged links are live and being used. To begin seeing results, you do not need to change any of the settings in Google Analytics. Simply go to Google Analytics’ Acquisition section and filter the results by source, medium, or campaign. This section displays all of your results.

Here are a few examples of how UTM tracking might help you better analyse the success of your campaigns.

• Analyze the effectiveness of Facebook ads in comparison to organic or earned links.
• See how much traffic each influencer generates when they share your post.
• Analyze the impact of a single piece of content across all of your marketing platforms.

6 UTM tracking tips

1. Calculate social media ROI using UTM parameters.

Including UTM parameters in social media, links allow you to track and prove the effectiveness of your efforts. You can demonstrate to your boss, clients, or stakeholders how social media updates increase traffic to your website. Lead generation, referral traffic, and conversions will all be straightforward visible. The influence of social media on company income can then be reported.

2. To fine-tune your social media strategy, use UTM parameters.

UTM characteristics make it easy to identify which social methods are the most effective—and the least expensive.

This data can assist you in making key decisions about where to concentrate your efforts (and budget). Twitter, for example, may drive more traffic to your site, while Facebook generates more leads and conversions.

You can utilise that knowledge to help you develop goals that are both relevant and achievable. Then, to keep track of your progress, utilise UTM parameters.

3. When testing, use UTM parameters.

A/B testing (also known as split testing) allows you to put assumptions about what works best for your audience to the test and confirm them.

You can’t always rely on conventional wisdom to be correct for your brand at any given time. Hootsuite, for example, recently discovered that posts without links performed better with their audience on Instagram and LinkedIn.

4. Track influencer marketing results with UTM parameters.

For many companies, influencer marketing is an important social media approach. However, calculating the return on investment of influencer initiatives can be difficult.

It’s simple to track how much traffic each influencer sends to your site by using a unique UTM tag for each one. UTM codes can be used to determine which influencer posts are the most effective. This assists you in determining which influencers have the potential to form long-term collaborations.

5. Use a spreadsheet to keep track of UTM links.

Once you start using UTM codes, the number of links you track will quickly increase. To make them easier to manage and eliminate duplicate links, keep them organised in a spreadsheet.

Each brief link should be listed in your spreadsheet. Then keep note of the full, pre-shortened URL, as well as all of the UTM codes and the date the abbreviated URL was produced. Make a note field so you can keep track of any important information.

6. Make a campaign preset for multiple posts.

Admins on Hootsuite Team, Business, and Enterprise plans can create a campaign preset that saves UTM codes. Each team member can then apply the preset to a campaign post with a couple of clicks.

This eliminates the need to manually enter each parameter. It also eliminates the possibility of using slightly different codes by accident, which would skew your data.

You can create presets for campaigns as well as a default preset that will apply to all links in your social media posts. Once you’ve configured the presets, they’re available to all team members.

Conclusion

You now have a good understanding of how to generate UTM parameters and build a tagging structure. Once you’ve set one up, Google Analytics will display the generated traffic in your ‘Campaign Overview,’ allowing you to analyse each and every visit to your site. To maximise the impact, select ‘All Campaigns’ from the Acquisition tab and add ‘Source/Medium’ as your secondary dimension.

Contact The Social Lions today to learn how to easily create UTM parameters and track the success of your social media efforts. We are a digital marketing agency that focuses on using all of the parameters to maximise the effectiveness of your brand.