If you’ve ever used Google Analytics, you’ve probably heard about UTM parameters.
UTM parameters aren’t a new technology. In fact, they’re ubiquitous.
But they also may be one of the most misunderstood and most frequently abused website tracking tools around.
So today, I’m here to explain what they are, why they were invented, when you need to use them, and when you absolutely don’t.
UTM parameters help us track channel attribution
Let’s start with the basics.
UTM parameters are one of the many tools marketers use to attribute conversions to different channels.
Attribution may sound fancy and intimidating, but the concept is simple: it just means figuring out which marketing efforts influenced your conversions.
Attribution is important because content marketers use many different channels to send traffic to our websites. Without attribution, we wouldn’t know which channels actually worked.
Let’s say you sell an online course, and you have three major marketing efforts going on:
- You spent last month optimizing your website for organic search.
- You just launched your first round of Facebook Ads.
- One of your colleagues is mentioning your course in their newsletter next week.
Without an attribution tool, all you’ll see in your reporting platform is the end result of these efforts — the sessions and conversions that happened after users got to your site.
But by using a free and simple tool like UTM parameters with Google Analytics, you’ll be able to see how many people came to your site from organic search, email, or Facebook ads, and how many sales each channel influenced.
Now, you may have read about different attribution models and other advanced attribution tech.
While cutting-edge technology is always tempting, unless you’re a large enterprise company, simple attribution like UTM tracking will likely be more than enough to show you what you need to see.
With attribution, a little bit can go a long way.
What UTM parameters are
You’ve likely seen UTM parameters before, floating around on social media or in emails. They look like this:
examplesite.com/great-post?utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=daily-posts
UTM parameters are a specific application of a technology called query parameters, which is the name for the key-value pairs after the question mark in the above URL.
A single query parameter looks like this:
?key=value
Query parameters are a versatile technology, and they are used for much more than channel tracking. Designers sometimes use them to alter content slightly on a web page, and Google search uses a query parameter to display search results.
Technically, you could use any query parameter key to pass tracking data into an analytics platform.
But the UTMs — “utm_medium,” “utm_source,” “utm_campaign,” and so on — are the standard set by Google Analytics, and are automatically recognized by many different tracking platforms.
Why UTM parameters were invented
So, now we know why attribution is important, and we know what UTM parameters are. But how did we come to use UTM parameters for attribution? And why do we need them sometimes, but not others?
It all goes back to the browser.
When you go from one website to another inside your browser, your browser stores the URL of the page you just left as the “referrer.”
Tracking platforms like Google Analytics can read that referrer, even after you’ve…
