With LinkedIn’s recent announcement that they’ve added dynamic UTMs to LinkedIn Ads, we thought now is a good time to refresh your understanding of UTM parameters. 

These simple snippets of text can make a world of difference in your ability to analyse and refine your marketing across channels. Whether you're running paid search ads, sharing blog posts on social media, or launching a new email newsletter, consistent use of UTM codes allows you to accurately attribute traffic sources and measure performance across all your marketing activities.

By adding UTM parameters to the URLs you share, you can simplify data gathering and analysis in Google Analytics (GA4) and other analytics software. And knowing which campaigns, channels, and content variations are driving the most traffic and conversions allows you to optimise your strategies for maximum impact. 

So, marketers who understand how to properly implement UTM parameters have a significant competitive advantage. They gain the ability to make data-driven decisions based on precise metrics rather than make assumptions about what is resonating with their audience.

With that in mind, this comprehensive guide will review what UTM parameters are, how to create them, and why they’re so vital to your marketing efforts. 

What Are UTM Parameters?

The term Urchin Tracking Modules is a holdover from Urchin Software Corp, a company that Google acquired in the early 2000s. Widely known as UTMs, they serve as a way to track and compile marketing data about people who visit your company's website.

What UTM Parameters Look Like 

UTM parameters are pieces of text that you attach to the backend of URLs to collect information about how a visitor arrived at your site. They allow you to track key factors, including the source, medium, and campaign that led a user to your site. 

If you’re not aware of UTM codes, you might think that you’ve never encountered one before, but the reality is that they’re part of your daily experience. At some point or another, you’ve clicked on a link - perhaps in an email - and seen a long string of text in the web address that looks something like this:  

https://mybusiness.com/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter

This URL includes two UTM codes: utm_medium=email and utm_source=newsletter. 

Each of code consists of a parameter, which always starts with utm_, and a tracking variable. The variable identifies the specific parameter you’re tracking, such as email marketing. 

In this example, you’re tracking the source and medium that brought the visitor to your homepage. More specifically, you’re collecting information about users who arrived there through an email newsletter that was part of your marketing campaign. 

The Purpose of UTM Parameters

When you attach UTM parameters to your URLs, the goal is to get as much actionable information about visitors as possible. The UTM code reveals important insights about your marketing campaigns across multiple traffic sources and channels, including which marketing strategies are the most appealing and effective at driving visitors to your website. 

When someone clicks on a link with a UTM code, it sends data to GA4. You can then use that data to conduct a deeper analysis of your marketing methods. For example, if you discover that a particular campaign is driving very little traffic, it might be time to modify it or shift your focus to more successful initiatives.

The Five Standard UTM Parameters

There are five core UTM parameters. These capture the most essential and useful information about website visitors across different platforms. Each of these standard parameters provides a portion of the data you can collect. 

Source: utm_source

This parameter identifies which site sent traffic to your page. Any external domain or platform could qualify as the source of your traffic. For instance, the UTM can determine whether a visitor found you through Facebook, Instagram, Google, Outbrain, or a blog. 

Medium: utm_medium

This parameter specifies the marketing medium, or the kind of link that someone clicked when they came to your site. This might include an email, video, social media post, or cost-per-click (CPC) paid campaign ad, such as Google Ads.

Campaign: utm_campaign

The campaign parameter indicates the specific campaign driving the traffic. You can use an ID or name for the campaign, such as launch or winter_sale. Unlike source and medium UTM parameters, the options for campaign parameters are virtually limitless because they can reflect any of the marketing campaigns your business is currently running. 

Term: utm_term

The term parameter identifies paid search keywords and indicates which search term brought a user to your website. You can also use this parameter for other custom variables, such as if you're targeting a specific audience with a series of ads. 

Content: utm_content

This parameter tracks the specific item the visitor clicked on that directed them to your website, such as a banner ad or text link. The content parameter can help distinguish between two links that would otherwise be difficult to separate. 

For example, if you produce an email newsletter with two separate call-to-action (CTA) links, both links would come through as the same UTM medium. This additional parameter would allow you to identify which of the two links the user clicked. 

Selecting the Right Parameters

Using a combination of UTM codes is usually the best way to conduct a detailed analysis of your marketing campaign. 

The source, medium, and campaign parameters provide vital information about your marketing and should always take top priority. 

The term and content parameters are optional, but they can provide extremely useful data when you need a more granular level of detail. The content parameter, for instance, is an excellent way to differentiate between campaigns or conduct more effective A/B testing.

The Structure of a UTM Parameter

One of the reasons UTM parameters are such a powerful tool for marketers is that they're accessible. Unlike some other kinds of tracking, they don't require extensive technical knowledge or coding experience. Instead, they feature a combination of a few words and symbols that allow GA4 to determine what information you're looking for, collect it, and share it with you.

Static and Dynamic Variables

One point marketers need to understand before they begin using UTM parameters is the difference between static and dynamic variables.

Static tracking variables remain the same unless you choose to go into the system and change them. For example, if you use the parameter utm_source=google, that parameter won’t change regardless of any adjustments you might make to your campaign. 

Dynamic variables, on the other hand, change based on the context of a user’s click. They tell the system to automatically pull information from an associated account on a marketing platform, such as Google Ads.

For instance, the parameter utm_campaign={{campaign_name}} will automatically fill in the name of the campaign without requiring you to do it manually. Depending on what link a user clicks, the variable would change to a name, such as autumn_2024 or product_launch. 

Breaking Down a UTM Code

When you put together parameters and tracking variables, the end result is a complete UTM code. A simplified implementation of a UTM parameter might look like this: 

https://landingpage.com/?utm_source=outbrain&utm_campaign={{campaign_name}}

In this example, you can see a few core components: 

• https://landingpage.com/ is the website landing page for the campaign in question

• utm_source is a source tracking parameter and =outbrain is the static or fixed variable value

• utm_campaign is a campaign tracking parameter and ={{campaign_name}} is the dynamic variable value, which will change to the specific campaign name for each click

In terms of the symbols contained in the URL, you'll notice that there's an ampersand symbol (&) between the parameters. This allows you to gather multiple data points for a single link rather than just one. Additionally, depending on the platform, you may place variable or dynamic values between one or two sets of curly brackets. 

Combining these elements with the correct formatting and order creates a URL that directs users to your campaign landing page while also gathering data about how they ended up there. You can then review this information in GA4 to learn more about how well specific parts of your marketing strategy are performing.

Why Use UTM Parameters?

UTM parameters are some of the best methods available to marketers who want to improve their conversion rates and increase their revenue. They've become a mainstay of marketing performance analysis because they offer distinct benefits with a relatively low level of effort. 

Accurate Tracking of Marketing Campaigns

Website analytics, social media monitoring, and forms are all viable ways to evaluate your marketing initiatives. However, those strategies have limitations in terms of how much data you can access. In addition, the results that you do gather are often superficial and may be inaccurate.

Tagging content with UTM codes makes it far easier to track the success of each element of your campaigns. You can understand what journey users took before arriving at your page without performing any intensive decoding. 

This kind of traffic analysis also goes deeper into marketing data than many other methods. In addition to knowing that visitors arrived from a certain domain, the UTM link can show you the specific page, ad, or campaign that they selected. That tells you a lot about user preferences, interests, and behaviours. 

Using GA4, you can parse through this tracking information with detailed reports and filter it based on certain parameters. This allows you to quickly access data, build reports for each aspect of your campaign, and make side-by-side comparisons. 

Determining ROI

Deciding how to distribute spending for your campaigns is always a challenge, but it's much worse when you're not working with complete and accurate data. UTM codes provide you with detailed information, so you can make the best possible financial decisions and maximise your return on investment (ROI).

For that to happen, you'll need to know exactly which channels, ad creatives, and campaigns are contributing directly to your revenue. Because you can associate UTM codes with certain campaigns or advertisements, you can determine how much revenue each initiative generates. By comparing that amount to what you spent on each element of the campaign, you can nail down a reliable ROI. 

What's most exciting about UTMs is what you can do with that information once you capture it. When you discover that a particular campaign or ad isn't working, you can quickly cut back on your spending and minimise your losses. On the flip side, when initiatives are working well and drawing impressive traffic, you can double down and maintain or increase your spending to build on that growth. 

Knowing what types of advertising are most effective at engaging users can also shape your future marketing efforts. Evaluating the strengths of each campaign is an ideal way to prepare and make sound decisions about where you'll invest your marketing funds moving forward.

Optimising Marketing Efforts

Once you understand your marketing campaign performance and ROI, you can adjust your strategy to get the best results. The data-driven insights you garner from UTM codes allow you to test countless variables, including images, keywords, ad copy, and videos. 

Some of the specific steps you can take based on the information you get from UTM codes include:

• Tracking how the same piece of content performs across multiple marketing channels and making decisions about where you should put your focus or increase your efforts

• Trying different pieces of content with similar messaging to determine which are the most appealing to users 

• Segmenting your audience based on the sources or campaigns that drove them to your website and tailoring your messaging and offers to each group's preferences and behaviours 

Each of these tactics contributes to the larger goal of continuously boosting your traffic, conversions, and revenue. 

Setting Up UTM Parameters

At first glance, UTM parameters might look intimidating. In practice, developing and implementing UTMs is fairly straightforward, particularly after you get a solid grasp of the best practices for creating them. 

Establish Consistent Naming Conventions

One of the keys to maximising the value and efficiency of your UTM parameters is developing a system of naming conventions. 

This system should allow you to easily identify specific parameters and data points on GA4 and other platforms. Consistency also enables you to analyse data over long periods of time, regardless of whether team members come or go.

As you begin planning your naming conventions, keep these factors in mind: 

• Capitalisation: GA4 is case-sensitive, so it will log otherwise identical parameters separately if the capitalisation differs, such as in Facebook and facebook. Although you can choose whatever system of capitalisation works best for your purposes, the easiest solution is typically to stick exclusively to lowercase letters. 

• Spacing: Spaces can cause serious issues with UTM links and may affect your data. To avoid those pitfalls, use underscores or dashes in place of spaces, such as spring-event instead of spring event. 

• Spelling: Make sure everyone on your team spells terms correctly and uses the same abbreviations. For instance, if one person tags a URL with Instagram and another uses IG, the data won't fully reflect your traffic from that source. 

• Simplicity: Don't get overly fancy or complex with your UTM tags. Keep them short and sweet so they're easier to track, implement, and understand. 

In addition to these points, it's also important to remember that users can see the UTM parameters attached to your URLs. Avoid using any text that you would feel uncomfortable with them seeing. 

Once you have a UTM in place, it's best for your data that you never change it, so select something from the outset that you know is appropriate to your needs and customers.

Keeping all your naming conventions straight is nearly as difficult as developing them. To ensure everyone gets on the same page — and stays there — write a comprehensive document or create a spreadsheet that lists all your UTM parameters. In addition, keep a complete record of all the UTM codes already in use so that you avoid duplicating them. 

Within your UTM documentation, include guidelines that your team should follow if they have the authority to create custom parameters so you don't end up with a confusing mishmash of data that you have to sort through down the road. For example:

Use UTM Parameter Builders and Tools

Once you have a system of naming conventions in place, you can move on to generating the actual UTM codes. To work through this process as quickly and easily as possible, take advantage of one of the many free UTM builders available online. 

Google offers three helpful tools for this purpose: 

• Google Analytics Campaign URL Builder for generating URLs to websites 

• Google Play URL Builder for generating URLs to apps on the Google Play Store 

• iOS Campaign Tracking URL Builder for generating URLs to apps on the Apple App Store 

These tools are typically user-friendly, walking you through each stage of building your UTM-coded URL. Generally speaking, you'll start by entering your site URL and then proceed to input the parameters you want to track. Keep an eye out for errors or typos, as they can throw off your data and make a UTM invalid.

After you enter all the necessary information, the tool will create a UTM tracking link for you to copy and add to your marketing content. It may also offer the option to shorten the URL to make it more appealing to users and make the UTMs less obvious.

Test and Monitor UTMs

Writing a UTM-coded URL is only the first step. Before you put it to use, it's important to ensure that it's working correctly. 

Run a quick test to confirm that it's tracking and attributing the data that it should and that the reporting and analysis align with your expectations. Once you feel confident that it's well-structured, you can share the link publicly and begin gathering information.

One of the biggest advantages of UTMs is that they provide fast, actionable data. For that reason, don't neglect them once they're up and running. Encourage your team to monitor them by frequently looking through your analytics reports. This will help you discover in the early stages if certain sources or campaigns aren't contributing sufficiently to your website traffic.

Examples of Effective UTM Parameters

To get a better understanding of what your UTM parameters should look like, it's helpful to break down some examples. The types of parameters you’ll use may change based on the specific situation and the information that would be most useful to you. 

First, imagine that you want to direct traffic to a service page on your website. Your base URL is https://mysite.com/services. If you want to collect data for traffic that arrives at that page, these are some UTM parameters you might use: 

• utm_source=meta

• utm_medium=paid-social

• utm_campaign=product-launch

This is the result when you put these parameters together into your URL: 
https://mysite.com/services?utm_source=meta&utm_medium=paid-social&utm_campaign=product-launch

If there's not already a question mark in your URL, use one to separate your URL parameters from the domains and subdomains. This indicates to GA4 that all the text in the rest of the link is meant to collect data rather than serve as part of the domain name.

As another example, consider what information you might want to gather if you’re offering a special promotion on a service to coincide with an industry conference. In that case, you might use a static parameter to indicate the specific campaign. Your parameters could include: 

• utm_source=google

• utm_medium=cpc

• utm_campaign=spring_conference_sale

• utm_term=conference

Adding these four parameters to your base URL gives you this: 

https://mysite.com/services?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=spring_conference_sale&utm_term=conference

With these parameters, you’ll receive more detailed information about traffic specifically tied to the upcoming conference and your associated promotion. The campaign parameter will tell you that users clicked on an ad specifically related to the ads you’re running leading up to the conference. In addition to that, the term parameter gives you insight into whether users arrived at your page after searching for information related to the conference. 

These data points, along with the source and medium information, could help you determine whether tying a discounted rate to an industry conference has any effect on the amount of traffic your marketing generates. This, in turn, would inform your planning for ads related to similar events farther out on the calendar. 

Implementing UTM Parameters Across Platforms

With a few small alterations, the five standard UTM parameters work similarly across all platforms. There are also platform-specific UTMs and variables that you can use to generate more detailed information about your marketing campaigns.

 These are additional parameters that specific ad platforms or channels have defined to allow for more detailed tracking of factors such as traffic sources, ad formats, and targeting tactics. With these platform-specific UTMs, you can go beyond the core UTM parameters and gain an even deeper understanding of your marketing campaigns. 

Recommendations for Key Platforms 

When using the standard UTM parameters, these are 1827 Marketing’s recommended variables for the major platforms, especially for B2B marketing

Note that dynamic variables, which change based on the context, go in brackets, while static variables that always remain the same don't have brackets. 

Additional Parameters for Deeper Insights

These are some other parameters that we recommend that you can to dig further into your marketing performance.

These parameters provide more nuanced data about your marketing content. For example, you could use the placement parameter to indicate whether a visitor clicked a link in the Instagram Feed or Stories section.

Considerations for Naming and Privacy

When using the utm_campaign parameter, you have the option to use IDs or names. Because users can see your UTMs, it's often best to use an ID so that your naming convention remains private. This will create some additional work for your team because you'll have to look up and cross-verify campaign names based on their IDs. However, it will avoid revealing your naming convention publicly.

Regardless of whether you use campaign names or IDs, consistency is essential for your reporting, analysis, and comparison. The names and IDs you use can make analysis by region and campaign type easier and faster.

Platform-Specific Dynamic Variables

The formatting and wording of UTM parameter variables differs based on the platform that you're using. These are the specific variables that you can use across each platform. 

Analysing Campaign Performance with UTM Parameters

When paired with the right analytics tool, the data you pull from UTM-coded URLs can transform your marketing strategy. 

GA4 is the platform of choice for many users because of its user-friendly design and inherent support for UTM codes. Each UTM parameter correlates to a dimension in GA4, so you can easily track various UTM code activity and make sound choices based on your analysis.

When using GA4, you can see UTM campaign data in three separate acquisition reports: 

• Overview 

• User acquisition

• Traffic acquisition 

While all of these reports are an option, traffic acquisition is usually the best place to see UTM-tagged traffic. The User Acquisition report only provides information about the number of new users that you acquired from each channel. 

Traffic Acquisition reports, on the other hand, don't focus on the user-level data but rather on how much traffic your marketing channels and campaigns are driving. This information is usually the most beneficial to your efforts to expand the amount of traffic your marketing channels generate.

To access Traffic Acquisition reports, go to the Reports link in GA4, select Acquisition, and then choose Traffic Acquisition. By default, you'll see the past 28 days' worth of data, but you can change the date range to see more or fewer days. When generating a report, you can also specify certain dimensions with UTM parameters or filter to see specific types of traffic. 

With your reports in-hand, you can now flag struggling or thriving campaigns, sources, and content. That knowledge will inform both your present and future decisions in terms of your spending, prioritisation, and creative approach. 

This enhanced decision-making will help ensure that you focus your time, efforts, and budget on top-performing campaigns that drive the most traffic. You can avoid wasting resources on low-performing initiatives that don't result in enough traffic to justify their continued use.

Using UTM Insights to Optimise Campaigns

The information you get from UTM tags is a painless way to get an understanding of what initiatives are most effective at driving traffic and conversions. You can then use this information to enhance your marketing strategies in a variety of ways, such as: 

• Adjusting campaign structure: When you initially build a campaign, you select what you see as the most appropriate channels. UTM data highlights which channels are contributing the most toward your goals and whether you need to restructure away from ones that haven't met your expectations. 

• Refining ad creative and messaging: By testing two pieces of content with related messaging or creative elements, you can quickly determine which lands the most consistently with users. Using the resulting UTM data, you can modify your ads to match the most impressive pieces. 

• Optimising ad placement and targeting: UTM parameters such as placement tell you if ads in certain locations are getting enough clicks. With that knowledge, you can more reliably target your audiences and drive greater traffic. 

• Allocating budget: Throwing money at ads that fail to generate leads, conversions, or revenue is a great way to drain your marketing budget with little to show for it. UTM codes offer a way to determine which campaigns and channels are able to generate traffic for your website and landing pages, so you can allocate your budget more wisely and improve your ROI. 

• Leveraging AI-driven decisions: Artificial intelligence (AI) within marketing platforms is increasingly responsible for decisions about creative within ads. UTM data helps ensure those decisions are data-based and make sense within your overall marketing strategy. 

Ultimately, UTM parameters provide you with crucial knowledge that you can use to enhance both existing and upcoming marketing campaigns. You'll have a more well-rounded perspective of the people who visit your website, how they're interacting with your marketing content, and what weaknesses you need to address. 

Advanced UTM Tracking Techniques

After you have the basics of UTM tracking down, you can start experimenting with more complex techniques. These methods help streamline your workflows and speed up your processes while also giving you a more granular view of your data. 

Using Custom UTM Parameters

While the five essential UTM parameters will generally cover most of your needs, you don't have to limit yourself to them. In some situations, it might make sense to adjust one of the main parameters by adding hyphenated text, but that's not always the best approach. With a little planning and practice, you can create custom parameters to track sources, channels, or campaigns beyond the capabilities of the standard options. 

Custom parameters are an excellent choice if you frequently use a marketing method that doesn't fully align with the five core parameters. 

For example, if you want to track how much traffic comes from a specific influencer or affiliate, you could use the parameters utm_influence= or utm_affiliate=. Likewise, if you work with multiple marketing agencies and want to see how their individual campaigns are performing, you could create a customer parameter of utm_agency=. 

Combining UTM Data With Other Metrics

Knowing that a particular campaign or ad is pushing a lot of traffic toward your website is one thing, but that doesn't necessarily mean that you're increasing revenue. To use your UTM tags to their full potential, combine the data you collect with other crucial key performance indicators (KPIs), such as: 

• Click-through rates 

• Conversion rates 

• Customer engagement 

• Customer lifetime value 

Consider setting goals for conversions within GA4 and using your UTM data to see which links are helping you meet those goals. Look for patterns and trends to determine which strategies have the biggest results in terms of generating leads, inspiring email signups, and closing sales. 

Identifying the marketing channels that are most conducive to conversions is critical to forming a solid strategy that reaps the most financial benefits. 

Integrating UTM Data With Other Tools 

You can also connect your UTM data to other marketing tools and platforms that your business uses. One of the most beneficial integrations is with your customer relationship management (CRM) software. 
Linking your UTM data with your CRM gives you a clear picture of how different marketing channels affect your bottom line. It provides you with enhanced details about leads, such as: 

• Where they're coming from 

• What type of content they enjoy 

• What campaign was most intriguing to them

• What keywords they use in searches 

Because this data is so informative, some CRM systems have built-in tools to generate UTM codes. If you're not sure whether your CRM tool has that capability, it's worth investigating because you can access such vital data about your prospects and customers.

The applications of UTM data go beyond your CRM tool. You can also incorporate it into your automation workflows, creating personalised customer experiences based on traffic sources and campaign interactions. If your marketing automation tool can track UTM tags, you can see which campaigns are driving the most traffic and conversions and use that information to optimise your marketing strategy. 

Common Mistakes to Avoid

UTM tags can yield powerful data that you can use to tap into the less obvious details of your marketing strategy. However, a seemingly harmless mistake could skew the information and cause confusion. 

As you begin writing and implementing UTM parameters, keep an eye out for these potential problems: 

• Ineffective naming conventions: When your parameter names are unclear, inconsistent, or overly detailed, it's difficult to accurately track your campaigns. Have your marketing team use clean, descriptive tags for the best results. 

• Forgotten parameters: The beauty of UTM parameters is that they're simple and fast, but that doesn't mean you'll always remember to include them. If you forget to take the extra step and add that small piece of text to your URLs, it could throw off your entire marketing data analysis. 

• Over-tagging: Think carefully about what URLs you want to tag and how many parameters you'll apply. Excessive tagging can create messy data and, in some cases, may slow down the load speed for the link, negatively affecting the user experience. 

• UTM tags for internal links: The goal of UTM tagging is to track incoming site traffic coming from external sources. Tracking internal site links can quickly scramble your data or cause errors within your analytics platform. 

• UTM tags on everything: Every UTM code you add to a URL should contribute to your efforts to better understand your marketing performance. As such, only add tags when you know they'll provide you with information that you genuinely need and can use to optimise your strategy. 

• Relying solely on UTM parameters: Don't look to UTMs as the sole source of truth for your marketing analysis. Use the data you gather in conjunction with other sources, such as other reports on GA4. 
  

Over time, UTM tagging will likely become like a reflex for you and your team, but don't get discouraged if that doesn't happen right away. If you're new to using UTM parameters, expect to encounter a learning curve and a few bumps along the way, and rest assured that the data you gather will be well worth the effort. 

Gain a New Perspective With UTM Parameters

From an everyday user's perspective, a UTM parameter looks like a random assortment of letters, numbers, and symbols in a link. For a marketer, however, that string of text can unlock a trove of valuable information that allows you to look at your marketing performance more objectively. 

UTM parameters give you hard data reflecting what parts of your advertising campaigns are connecting with users and which aren't worth your continued energy and effort. The knowledge you gain from UTM tags can become the foundation of your strategic decisions in campaign structure, placement, and budget. 

Ready to harness the power of UTM data and gain new insights into your marketing efforts?  Take advantage of our campaign management, content creation, and marketing automation expertise as you begin exploring the world of UTM parameters. Book a demo to learn more.