In our blog about UTM Coding 101, we went over the basics of UTM coding, specifically source, medium, ad content, and campaign. Now that you’re familiarized with the basics though, it’s important to know where you should use them.
Use UTM Coding for Offline Advertising
UTM Coding can be great at tracking offline marketing efforts that often times don’t have a direct ROI. For example, if you have a print ad or a billboard, there will be almost no way to track your ROI without a UTM coded vanity URL.
A vanity URL is a unique web address that is branded for marketing purposes (example: funinthesun.com would be a vanity url that you would want to use instead of your regular url gregsbeachwear.com). A vanity URL is more beneficial than a long url since people are less likely to type in all of the url (gregsbeachwear.com/billboard-promo).
When we assign the vanity URL for our offline marketing effort, we can then use a UTM code when we redirect it to the main site: (ex: gregsbeachwear.com/?utm_source=billboard&utm_medium=offline).
Use UTM Coding for Email Content
Email marketing programs have come a long way. In some cases they can even attribute view through conversion (i.e. someone who viewed an email, didn’t click on it, but then later made a purchase on your website). The downfall of almost all email marketing programs, however, is that they’re recorded in Google Analytics as direct traffic (see my blog about sources and mediums if you’re unfamiliar with this term).
Right now you probably don’t believe me that you’re getting almost no credit for your emails in Google Analytics, but luckily there’s a way to test this out. By using the real time feature in Google Analytics, click on a link in one of your emails and find out what Google deems the source and medium to be.
Once you’ve decided that you do want to UTM code your email links, take this opportunity to begin testing out different creative, calls to action, and email formats to see which versions are driving visits to your website.
Use UTM Coding for Social Post and Social Buttons
While Google is normally pretty good about attributing the right source and medium for your social posts, if you’re featuring posts that go to the same page multiple time or you’ve got special book buttons like the one you see below, it may be useful to use UTM coding.
If you want to take your UTM coding a step further, you can test out targeting different audiences, posting at different times of the day (especially with platforms like twitter), or different creative (especially with such visually-centric mediums such as Pinterest).
Use UTM Coding for QA
In an ideal world, we’d have a view in our Google Analytics account just for our own IP address. But in the event where we don’t have permission to filter out our own IP address, or if our IP addresses are anonymized to comply with GDPR, a UTM code may be your best bet for QA (Quality Assurance).
A test UTM code can be as simple as example.com/?utm_source=test&utm_medium=test
Lastly, this test UTM code may be helpful to QA your IP exclusion filters in Google Analytics. By asking the organization you’re filtering out to click on your test UTM code, you can see whether or not their traffic came through.
Summary
UTM Coding can be used anywhere and everywhere – whether you’re doing quality assurance on your website or tracking marketing initiatives across digital and traditional channels. Each opportunity to track is an opportunity to learn more about your audience and can increase ROI if done properly. Check out my other blog posts about UTM coding best practices with UTM coding part 1 and UTM coding part 2 or dive into why you still need UTM coding even though you have Facebook Insights and email report.