Do you know where traffic to your website comes from? Do you know which websites refer visitors to your site? One of the most effective solutions to answer these important questions is using UTM parameters. UTM parameters or codes might not be a tool every marketer is familiar with, but they certainly should be, as it is an essential and important tool for entrepreneurs, marketers, and site owners, with an emphasis on a focused understanding of measuring website traffic sources – undeniably super important information that will help us understand the effectiveness of our campaigns.
What is UTM?
A UTM is essentially an addition to a link that you can attach to links to various pages on your site and across your campaigns. For example, links you share, promote, and publish on your social media accounts. These additions contain information regarding the specific link’s location and purpose, enabling you – with appropriate and relevant technological solutions – to track clicks and traffic sources in a very accurate, high-quality way in Google Analytics.
UTM stands for Urchin Tracking Module, named after the software company that originally developed the solution and was later acquired by Google. When you see the structure of a link containing UTM, you’ll probably realize you’ve seen such links before and simply didn’t understand why the UTM parameter appeared in the link. Another explanation of what UTM is and the essence of this solution for tracking your traffic sources is that these parameters allow you to add 5 key tags to the link that enable tracking the specific performance of the link and the exact locations from which visitors arrived using each link.
The 5 tags are:
- Campaign Name / campaign – The specific campaign the link comes from.
- Traffic Source / source – Google, social networks, a specific site campaign, and so forth.
- Marketing Channel / medium– Email, social media, search, PPC, guest blog, and so forth.
- Content / content – A tag emphasizing the content that engaged the visitor, for example toppics_sep2021 and the like.
- Term / term – A tag for identifying keywords, to understand what people search for when they find your ads.
What are the benefits of UTM?
As mentioned, UTM parameters allow site owners and digital marketers to better and more accurately understand where their traffic comes from in Analytics. For example, if you are very active on social media, you might be posting dozens or even hundreds of links a day. UTM codes help you monitor and track the performance of each of these links, so you can know where traffic is coming from, what works, and what doesn’t and is simply wasting your time and money.
Smart and effective use of this tool provides vital, highly practical data in a deeper and broader way than the basic data obtained, for instance, from Google Analytics and other tech solutions for website traffic monitoring. It’s worth emphasizing that using it allows you to receive data through Google Analytics, of course, but Google’s system does not generate the links—it only monitors visitors arriving through them. This tool allows any marketer to fine-tune and optimize their marketing funnels, reduce trial and error, generate detailed reports, and implement affiliate marketing more effectively and accurately.
What can be measured with it?
Ultimately, after effectively and properly applying the codes to your links, every link you publish and upload to the digital space will help you measure basic and essential data, answering the following fundamental questions:
- Where the traffic is coming from – via the source tag
- How the traffic reaches your site – via the medium + campaign tags
- Why this traffic is coming to your site – via the content + term tags
How to measure website activity by traffic sources using UTM
There is no obligation to use all parameters, and you can definitely add to your links only the parameters that are relevant to you for a specific campaign or digital activity—for example, just the campaign name or source, or only the search term or call to action from which the visitor arrived. After creating links with UTM, you can track their performance in the Google Analytics interface you’re likely already familiar with, through several different reports and configuring the relevant tags you want to see data for.
Tools for creating UTM
Naturally, if you upload and post lots of links across different platforms and numerous marketing channels, you aren’t going to sit and manually write each link with UTM codes – in case anyone still had any doubt! Today, there are convenient technological tools available for creating links with UTM parameters. Here are some high-quality examples—some are specific web interfaces and some come as Chrome browser extensions.
- Google’s URL Builder: Google offers a tool for building URLs with UTM. In Google’s URL builder tool, you simply enter the relevant details into the appropriate fields and get a link ready to copy and paste.
- UTM.io: A Chrome extension that allows quick and easy creation of UTMs in your links, including the option for bulk creation of multiple links, a domain name shortening tool, a smart and efficient management interface, and more.
- Analytics UTM Builder: Another Chrome extension for building links with UTM codes. The extension advertises itself as a version of Google’s URL builder tool, but “on steroids”, with a variety of additional and enhanced capabilities that the search and advertising giant’s tool lacks. For example, automatic reading of web addresses, automatic lowercase enforcement, support for leading link shortening services, and more.
Common mistakes when using UTM
- Mislabelling links from social media and not separating paid and non-paid social campaigns.
- Adding uppercase letters to the UTM and then searching by lowercase UTM tags – this makes a difference!
- Creating unclear UTM parameters in campaign reports.
- Incorrect and improper use of the symbols “&”, “=”, “?”, and “#” within UTM tags.
- Using UTM to track internal links within the site.
- Not checking that the link works before publishing and using it.
- Confusing the source tag with the medium tag – similar, but completely different!
- Omitting the only required parameter in the UTM model, “utm_source” – without this, tracking will not work.
How to view the data in Analytics
To see the UTM parameters we added in Analytics, we can go to the Acquisition report and from there to the All Traffic report to see all traffic sources and how many leads they brought us:
You can also add a Secondary dimension to any report in Analytics, add one of the UTMs, and view the breakdown. Here, for example, I added Campaign, and this is how I see which campaign brought the most traffic to my site:
Summary
Now you understand what UTM is and why you even need this thing, which seems complicated and intimidating at first, but is actually quite simple and, above all, highly useful and effective—a tool that allows you to take your marketing and monitoring capabilities to the next level of professionalism and depth, thereby improving performance and results. Go ahead and start implementing UTM codes in your links; share with us how it helped you advance.
About the Author
Or Fialkov is the CEO and owner of Fialkov Digital, a digital marketing and advertising agency. He runs paid campaigns on Google, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, and TikTok, and builds websites and landing pages. He also implements AI in businesses, including AI agents, agentic marketing automation, AI reporting systems, GEO (Generative Engine Optimization), and AI video for campaigns.
