In today’s video, we’re going to dive into how to use UTM parameters in Google Analytics. UTM parameters are a very handy way to track all your online marketing efforts.
For example, let’s say you wanted to see how many people visited a special promotion webpage on your website with its own unique URL Additionally, you blasted this URL out through social media, email and even spent money on online advertising. How would know which marketing channel sent you to most traffic?
Well, that’s exactly the problem that UTM parameters solve. You can organize your campaigns to track the effectiveness of different marketing channels. Watch the video below and see how easy it is with Google Analytics:
Video Transcription
Bryan: Hi, I’m Bryan with KISSmetrics, and I’m here to help you get the most out of your Google Analytics account. Today, I’m going to show you how to track every single instance of a link that you send out.
Imagine this, you spend months making this killer product, you’ve thrown up a landing page to it, and now you’re going to send out several tweets to drive traffic to your landing page. You send out a series of 15 tweets over the course of a week, you drive 5, 000 people onto that landing page.
Now you want to step back and see which tweet drove the most traffic. If you put the same link in every tweet, that’s impossible to do. However, with the method I’m going to show you today you can know exactly which tweet drove the most traffic. Which link people clicked on the most? Then you can use that on Facebook posts, on your landing pages, on your website, different places on your website, to track which specific link sending traffic to the same URL drove the most traffic.
Today, I’m going to teach you about UTM Parameters. First, I’m going to tell you what they are. Second, I’m going to show you how to set them up. And third, I’m going to show you how to read your Google Analytics Report to gain valuable information to use on your site. So, let’s get going.
[music]
Bryan: So, what is a UTM Parameter? UTM Parameters are simply tags that are added to the end of a URL. So if you’ve ever been to a website before, look in the address bar and notice the URL was this long. It’s probably because it was using UTM Parameter tags.
What this allows you to do is when a user clicks on that link, all of the tags are sent back to Google Analytics for tracking. I used this on my personal site for promoting my video training course. So, I’ve promoted in several spots. I’ve promoted on the sidebar, in the footer, in my bio page, and at the bottom of every blog post. And I do this by creating a unique URL for each instance of the link, and that URL looks something like this.
When I go into Google Analytics I can see a report very similar to this, that shows me all of the Analytics of that exact link. You can customize your UTM Parameters to tell you almost anything you want to know about the details of how people are getting to the most important parts of your website. This can give you an even better idea of what really works in terms of your own net marketing. In a nutshell, a UTM Parameter are simply tags that you add to the end of the URL that allow you to track each specific instance of a link.
The simplest way to create UTM Parameters for your links is by using the Google Analytics Link Builder. Right below the video is a link to that tool that you can use right away. Now let’s walk through the process of building a link inside the Link Builder.
The link we are going to make is for a blog post that I’m publishing in a week. And at the end of that blog post will be a link to my free video training course. And what I want to do is be able to know how many people clicked on that link inside the blog post and how much traffic that generated for me. So, let’s head over to the Link Builder and get started.
You’ll immediately notice six form fields on this page. There’s only four that are required, so we’re going to focus on those just to start. First, in step one is the Website URL. This is simply the URL of the page you want the user to land on once they click your link. So we’re going to fill out the URL of my landing page here. Next is the campaign source.
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