What is UTM Code and How to Track Social Media Success

Every website, internet store, or online platform needs traffic, and you can achieve it in different ways. Sometimes one of your traffic streams performs well, while the other isn’t so profitable and successful. So, how can we filter these sources and analyze which one works better and brings more visitors to the site?

What is UTM Code?

UTM code is a portion of text added to the end of a URL that enables you to track visits to that URL. These could be visits inspired by your social media posts, emails, pay-per-click campaigns — basically anytime you want to know where traffic is coming from. This is useful when you’re testing what promotion methods work best and to track the performance of certain content pieces.

Every part of the UTM Code contains information. It’s situated in two points — the name of the parameter and its value. UTM Code helps to get more information about each source of traffic. For example, with UTM’s help, you can track which places of advertising campaigns bring less profit. And also, after that, you can allocate budgets and resources. It helps to respond quickly to changes on websites and allocate advertising budgets.

How Do You Create a UTM Code?

For example: www.example.com/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=utm_code

utm_source/medium/campaign — the name of the parameter
google/cpc/utm_code — value of it

Here we can see the next points:

Google — an advertising system and source which brought a user to us
Cpc — type of traffic, cost per click
Utm_code — the name of the advertising campaign

To create your own UTM Code, you can use this tool. There you can create a link with your own parameters and the site is user-friendly. It means that even a newbie could deal with it.

What Types of UTM Parameters Can You Create?

There are two types of parameters — main and optional.

UTM Code	Description	Example

Main (parameters that must be at every UTM Code)
utm_source	Advertising system (Google Ads, Bing Ads)	utm_source=googleutm_source=bing
utm_medium	Kind of traffic: cpc cpm mailing	utm_medium=cpc utm_medium=cpm utm_medium=email
utm_campaign	The name of the campaign: Toys Books	utm_campaign=toys utm_campaign=books
Optional (Codes which you can use necessarily)
utm_term	Key word which helps to show our product	utm_term=buy_books utm_term=keyword
utm_content	Information which helps to distinguish advertising if other parameters are same	utm_content=text utm_content=link

How Do You Start Viewing and Tracking a UTM Code in Google Analytics?

Suppose you become comfortable with the idea of tagging campaign URLs and have started to tag URLs for your online marketing campaigns. In that case, you’ll need to know where to find information about your campaign’s success (or not) in Google Analytics.

The information you need can be found in Acquisition > Campaigns > All Campaigns within Google Analytics. The report will break everything down automatically by Campaign Name.

Remember, if any of your campaigns haven’t yet received any clicks, the parameters you’ve set won’t have been triggered, and therefore, those URLs will NOT be reported in this section until they’ve actually been clicked.

Where Should You Use UTM Tracking Codes?

Let’s imagine that we have a task to make some good advertising for this article. Why not?

We need to take a link to this post and place it in the UTM Builder with relevant parameters. The next step is to add a created link to the advertisement. When a user clicks on this link, we will get a notification about this pleasant fact in Google Analytics. There will be information about the click and the source of the traffic. For example, it will be google/CPC.

Create different UTMs for each platform that will generate your traffic. And don’t forget to make them shorter because the link with all these UTM stuff looks very long and scary. Also, it takes more letters, and it can look worth a post if you decide to place it, for example, on Twitter.

UTM Codes help us gather information about all users’ sessions with all advertising spending to understand costs and payback of channels.

UTM Tracking examples

Here you can see some examples of UTM key tracking words.

CPC (Cost per click) tracking

You first want to create a tracking URL for a Google cost per click (CPC) campaign promoting your new online store landing page targeting the keywords “camping gear.”

Your tracking URL might look something like this:

www.example.com/page?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=online_store&utm_term=camping-gear

Social Media Tracking

You need another tracking URL to determine the success of a paid social media campaign on Instagram directing users to your landing page og the new store.

Your tracking URL might look something like this:

www.example.com/page?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=paid-social&utm_campaign=online_store

Email Marketing Campaign Tracker

You need to make some promotional emails that include three links — a logo, an image, and an orange CTA button — directing users to the landing page of your new store.

www.example.com/page?utm_source=new-promo&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=online_store&utm_content=logo
www.example.com/page?utm_source=new-promo&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=online_store&utm_content=main-image
www.example.com/page?utm_source=new-promo&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=online_store&utm_content=orange-cta

Make your marketing campaigns more effective and profitable by using UTM Codes. That will save you time and money!