UTM stands for Urchin Tracking Module and is a string appended to a URL to allow Google Analytics properly attribute a visit to the correct source, medium, campaign, and more. You can find Google’s tool to make your own UTM codes here. Don’t worry. They’re pretty simple to figure out and invaluable when you start running campaigns, want to see how visitors from specific sources interact with your website, and more.
http://marketinghackers.net/?utm_source=adwords&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=example&utm_term=marketing_hacks&utm_content=ad_group_one is an example URL with a UTM code appended to it.
Lets go through the fields.
Got a good handle on it all now? You don’t even have to only use Google’s UTM codes and can set custom parameters as well that will show up as part of the URL in Google Analytics. A good use for this is measuring navigation on the site. Lets say you set the URL on the main menu of http://marketinghackers.net/ to be “http://marketinghackers.net/about/?ref=TN” instead of its default “http://marketinghackers.net/about/.” (?ref=TN stands for Reference and Top Navigation, respectively). Now whenever someone clicks “About” on the homepage, those pageviews would have their URLs have “?ref=TN” appended to them, appear separately in Google Analytics, and you would know how many visitors click to the about page during their visit, and what page they were reading when they did. Make sense?
It’s a good idea to keep all your UTM codes and ref codes in a spreadsheet to keep them tracked and organized. The UTM/ref slug always starts with a “?” and additional codes are added with “&” like in all the examples. Let me know in the comments if you have any questions or suggestions!
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