Week 21 – UTM Codes & URL Builder

🎯 👓 Eyes down, it’s Week 21 of the #atozofseo

🆄 for UTM codes/URL builder ✅

Yep, 2 for 1 one this week, as connected and often misused.

A UTM code is a bunch of parameters added to the end of a page/URL to track external campaigns such as Social Ads and Email Marketing. The tool to help create these is the URL Builder (from Google – there are others available…)

A piece of trivia for you – UTM stands for Urchin Tracking Module – Urchin was the ‘name’ of Analytics before Google bought it.

So, you’ll see these in the flesh sometimes by looking in your browser address bar and seeing things like this:

?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social

These flow into GA allowing reports to populate with your campaign data.

People often get these wrong in 3 main ways.

1 – using different versions of Source such as Facebook, FACEBOOK, FaceBook etc etc. Don’t…keep it all lower case

2 – Mixing source and medium up. Source is the place, medium is the type of place.

3 – (and the one that bugs me the most) using UTM codes on INTERNAL LINKS on your own site such as banners/calls to action buttons. This is a big no-no, it causes all sorts of tracking and attribution issues inside your Analytics reports.

In summary, use properly, be consistent and don’t use for internal tracking.

Link to the Google Tool & a neat one from Orbit Media Studios.