UTM Link Builder Template

What Is a UTM?

Urchin Tracking Modules (UTMs) are codes added to the end of URLs to tell marketers exactly where their traffic is coming from. The code consists of five parameters (source, medium, campaign, content and term) that give a holistic picture of where your website traffic is coming from. Understanding your traffic sources gives a clearer picture of marketing strategy performance, which can easily be analyzed in your Google Analytics account. Bonus points if your content management tool like Dash Hudson is already integrated with GA and automatically creates UTMs for you.

While you don’t need to use all five parameters when creating UTMs, it is recommended that you do, as it allows you to gather as much information as possible about where your traffic is coming from.  

Why Your Brand Needs To Be Using UTMs

Besides helping brands measure marketing results, UTMs help brands gain insights from various other tactics. What is the most valuable thing UTMs do? They allow brands to truly understand how the same content performs on different platforms. Without UTMs, it can be nearly impossible to track down and decipher different sources. Additionally, UTMs help connect your social marketing efforts to ROI by being able to link transactions directly with campaigns.

5 UTM Best Practices

If you’re new to the world of UTMs, they can be a little confusing. Because of this, we’ve compiled a list of the most important things to remember when using UTMs.

1. Determine what warrants a UTM

The great thing about UTMs is they are not limited to one type of campaign. UTMs can and should be used for affiliate campaigns, offline campaigns, digital ad campaigns, email campaigns and, of course, social campaigns. All of these types of campaigns benefit from UTMs because they allow you to get a holistic view of where someone viewing your site is coming from and, more importantly, how they got there. 

2. Be consistent in how you create UTMs

Consistency is key when creating UTMs for your campaigns in more ways than one. It’s important that once you start implementing UTMs, they become a mainstay in your strategy; otherwise, you will have inconsistent results. Consistency is also a must when it comes to creating the UTMs themselves. Lowercase is preferred as UTM codes are case sensitive. Underscores are preferable to spaces to keep your links neat and tidy. Lastly, be sure to keep your UTMs simple, but descriptive enough to know what it is attached to. 

3. Use a UTM link builder template

Creating UTMs manually can be an extremely time consuming task and leaves a lot of room for human error. By using a UTM link builder template, the code you need to create perfect UTMs is already in place, so all you need to do is plug in all of your information to get your code that is immediately ready to use. These types of templates also really improve the consistency of your links.

4. Track your links with a spreadsheet

Don’t just create, copy and paste your UTMs and then forget about them. It’s important to have a safe place to store them that you can reference often. As mentioned above, the great thing about a builder template is they already have the space built to store your UTMs, so it becomes a two-in-one space. 

5. Regularly analyze results

The whole point of implementing UTMs into your strategy is to get a better idea of how your content and campaigns are performing, so regularly analyzing your results is key to finding out how users are responding and gives you the data to understand what’s working and what isn’t. 

How To Use Dash Hudson’s UTM Builder Template

Building UTMs from scratch is a long process, but using Dash Hudson’s UTM link builder template expedites the process immensely, leaving you more time to analyze results and strategize your next move. Within this template, you will have the ability to add all of the typical UTM parameters alongside some additional details that will help you decipher the difference between your UTMs. There is also a built-in campaign generator for those looking to get even more specific with the campaign details like the region the campaign is active and the date. And no need to worry about where to store your UTMs, there is plenty of space in the builder to leave all your UTMs for simple storage and tracking.  

Understanding and tracking the effectiveness of your marketing efforts has never been easier. Download your free UTM generator template to get started today.