What is a UTM?

If you’ve ever clicked on an ad, email, or post on social media then the URL pops up as this crazy long string of characters that’s probably a UTM at work. In short, UTMs can help you understand where your traffic is coming from.

But wait a second, what is a UTM though? It’s a fancy marketing acronym that stands for Urchin Tracking Module and was developed a software company in the early 2000’s as a system of modifying URLs to include tracking parameters.

Those parameters (still used today) help group all the different kinds of traffic sources so analytics tools can organize and display your traffic data into easily digestible reports. You can see in the example below from an AppSumo link that we use the 3 main UTM categories (source, medium, campaign) but there are actually 5 available for anyone to use.

There are 5 sections or parameters that can make up a UTM.

1. Campaign source - Allows you to track where traffic originated. Sources may include Facebook, Google, a partner's website, or the name of an email list. The parameter added to your URL is utm_source.

2. Campaign medium - Allows you to track the source category that originated traffic. Mediums may include organic social, search, cost-per-click/CPC, referral, or display. The parameter added to your URL is utm_medium.

    

3. Campaign name - Allows you to track the performance of a specific marketing or promotional campaign. For example, this tag could help you separate how a specific link performs on LinkedIn ad campaigns and email. The parameter added to your URL is utm_campaign.

4. Campaign content - This parameter is helpful if you have multiple tracking URLs pointed to the same link. For example, if you include the same link multiple times in the same email, using the content parameter can help separate traffic based on which link placement they clicked within the email. The parameter added to your URL is utm_content.

    

5. Campaign term - This parameter is specific to paid search campaigns. It allows you to track the traffic from a specific keyword. The parameter added to your URL is utm_term.

What Does it Actually Do?

If it’s still unclear how they’re used here are a few top use cases that show the UTMs in action and how you can start using them as well.

When Used in Your Own Database

At AppSumo, we have a database with Snowflake and database visualizers with Metabase and Looker. The below screenshot shows a buyer report with the UTM parameters combined into one long string. We capture that string from the URL and store it as first party data in our database. From there we stitch the UTM data with our customer purchase data (stored forever in their profile) so we know which source to attribute each subsequent conversion.

Below how a UTM would look when using server-side tracking. For a single user event you can see everything about them including the source/medium you set in the URL they came from. This information is stored forever in a cloud server and when the user comes back with a different UTM that will also get stored. When looking at all of the UTMs from a single user or group of users that led them to purchase, that is multi-touch attribution. You can see all of the online interactions with your business and assign weights to each source channel to determine their value in the path to conversion. All made possible by UTM parameters!

When Used in Google Analytics Reports

Google Analytics is probably the best case for using UTMs, definitely the most used. Let’s say a link is opened from an email in an external program like Microsoft Outlook. Well because there is no referring website it would be registered in Google Analytics as direct traffic, which is not actually what happened. With UTMs you can tell Google (or whatever analytics tool you use) exactly where to bucket it so you can have clean reporting for all your marketing campaigns.

Here are two GA4 screenshots where one is using UTMs and the second is not.

In this screenshot you can see a sample sessions source/medium report where the traffic is tagged properly with UTM campaign source and medium. Clean data where all the sessions are grouped exactly where they should be.

The one below is without UTMs. As you can see Google is trying to pull the referring website but ends up putting too much in “direct / none” and then showing multiple referring rows from Facebook. All of those should be in a single source which is “ meta /cpc” since its all ads traffic, but you wouldn’t know that just by looking at this report.

Hopefully that illustrates the challenge not using UTMs can present. If you’re just starting out it may not matter as much, but as you scale and start to spend more money and test more channels, the data quickly becomes unusable.

How Do You Create a UTM?

The easiest way to start using UTMs is through Google’s URL Builder tool. You can put in the end URL, then the campaign source, campaign medium, campaign name, campaign term, and campaign content. We normally don’t use term or content, this is already an extra step when posting links anywhere so I like making it as simple as possible. Only source and medium are needed but adding in campaign as the third parameter gives enough detailed data about your traffic.

Is It Really That Important?

Yes! Building a process when building your marketing campaigns to use UTMs on all links promoting your business will save you a lot of headaches in the future when it comes time to analyzing traffic. Biggest thing I hear is “Well we’re too small and don’t need that right now, if it’s working I’ll know it”. Maybe at first yes, but when you start adding more channels into your marketing mix and your traffic groupings are all jumbled together in your analytics tools you’ll wish you had started sooner.

GA4 is the go-to platform for most businesses and if you want to use it most effectively you need to get UTMs in place as soon as possible. And to build a proper system to create and use UTMs it’s important to do 2 things.

First, set a naming convention for the campaigns you created. At AppSumo, we match the name of each ad campaign created to the name of the UTM campaign name so it can be easily matched and pulled from our database for better reporting.

The second thing is make sure you use ONE master sheet to keep all URLs you’re creating. Everyone on the marketing team should use this doc! It can be a very simple Google Sheet, you can even make a copy of the actual format we use below.

You can see it’s got preset drop downs and explanations for how to use each section. It’s VERY important that if you’re going to roll this out to your marketing team that you can make it easy. It’s the only way UTMs will be adopted and sustainable.

And now you’re a UTM pro! Looking forward to seeing how everyone will be using UTMs to have better control over their marketing.