Late Night Internet Marketing with Mark Mason -- Affiliate Marketing Tips, Online Business Advice, Email Marketing and SEO
UTM Parameters and Google Analytics: Understand Where Your Traffic Is Coming From [LNIM131]
Ever wondered about UTM Parameters and Google Analytics? Urchin Tracking Module Parameters are essentially special “tags” that you can add to links so that you can track the traffic generated by those links in Google Analytics. Admittedly, these links can look a little intimidating. So, in this episode, I explain UTM parameters for Google Analytics in a way that I hope most people will be able to understand.
I also talk about customer service lessons we can all learn from my recent visit to Hotel Contessa in San Antonio, Texas and my we break down another Internet Marketing Fortune Cookie (this time it's the Crab Rangoon).
UTM Secret Decoder Ring
The Secret Decoder Ring Download is a single-page PDF that you can keep handy and share whenever you need to remember how UTM parameters work, and what they mean.
Get Your UTM Parameter Decoder Ring Now
Show Notes
Internet Marketing Fortune Cookie: “A crab wonton a day, keeps the doctor away” – The stuff that got you to wherever you are in your business may not get you to where you need to be so strategically and carefully, but enthusiastically, embrace change in your business because this will keep the ‘doctor’ away.
UTM Parameters:
A link is comprised of three parts: the HTTP/s, the website or the domain name, and the stuff after that which you would usually think as the post slug but it’s really the path to the file on the web server. But occasionally, you will see that the path that you are looking at is followed by a question mark and after this, a bunch of symbols, letters, numbers that may seem gibberish. In here, you will also see the three letters U, T and M. This section is called UTM Parameters and it stands for Urchin Tracking Module. These are tags that you can put in URLs to help you figure out where you traffic comes from. If you are running a Facebook ad, for example, you can add these tags to your URL so that you know later exactly where that traffic came from. It’s important for you to know which ads are sending traffic to your site to determine which ones to run and which ones to stop. What’s really cool about this is you can use the conversion goal inside of Google Analytics to nail down what source of traffic is really creating opt ins or sales for you on your website.
There are four that I use when I do UTMs:
* The Source Parameter – this is used to identify which sites sent traffic. It’s a required parameter and examples include Facebook, Twitter, Google or Bing.
* The UTM Medium – this refers to the type of link that was used and is usually described as the type of advertising medium that you are using to send the traffic. It can be from social, banner ads, cost-per-click ads, etc.
* The Campaign Parameter – you can set this to determine which campaign the traffic is coming from. Examples can be special content campaign or a seasonal campaign such as a Spring Sales or a Halloween Promotion.
* The Content Parameter – this can help you identify specifically which ad was clicked to bring the user to the site. This is often used for AB testing so it can refer to the logo, a text in the ad or which one worked in sending you the traffic.
Now that you can track things, you might be looking for additional information about optimizing your conversions. If so, take a moment to check out
episode 126 on conversion optimization.
Here are some of the images that I mentioned in the episode. First of all, here is a picture of me with “Hispanic Elvis”. That's his description, not mine. This guy hangs out at the old market in San Antonio (on Market Street) in a restaurant called
Mi Tierra. I've been eating there since I was a kid,