utm_content = often used to track various creative versions.For a hypothetical paid advertising campaign halloween_2022 might be the campaign name that might span across various platforms. utm_campaign = often used to track the name of the specific campaign.This allows all email traffic to be rolled up and measured together (at the traffic campaign level) and for both the monthly newsletters and weekly sale emails to be rolled up separately (at the traffic source level). For the company above, utm_medium=email would be used for both links in the monthly newsletter and the weekly sale email. For a company that sends a monthly email newsletter and also a weekly sale email, they might use utm_source=monthly_newsletter in the first of those and utm_source=weekly_promo in the latter. utm_source = the specific source sending the traffic.Let’s look at some practical and hypothetical ways that we might use UTMs. Personally, I always use these 3 parameters and sometimes also use utm_content, depending on the situation. However, utm_campaign is almost always used as well (at least that one) to further catalog the traffic. When using UTM parameters to manually tag your traffic utm_source and utm_medium are always required. These parameters tell Google Analytics that this traffic originated from Gmail (utm_source=gmail), and is email “type” traffic (utm_medium=email), and comes specifically from my email signature (utm_campaign=signature). See all that stuff in the red box below? Those are the UTM parameters that I’ve added to the end of the link in my email signature. ![]() ![]() If you got an email like this from me and decided to click the link, you’d see this full URL resolve once you made it to. The signature is saved as an image and any clicks on it will go to the homepage here at Root and Branch. I added a link to the signature in emails that I send from Gmail. How to Use UTM Parameters to Track Traffic from Email Signature Let’s look at an example of some email traffic that we might want to track and where we can find that data in our GA4 property. One type of traffic that Google Analytics can’t automatically identify is email traffic. In those situations Google Analytics needs us to give it some help. However, it cannot measure all traffic on its own. Google Analytics can categorize most traffic like this automatically. In the example below about organic search traffic, “google” and “bing” are examples of traffic sources while “organic” is the medium. For example, all organic traffic from search engines is automatically categorized based on a traffic “source” and a traffic “medium.” The source is the specific place that the traffic is coming from. Google Analytics categorizes most traffic automatically. How Does Google Analytics Know Where Website Traffic Comes From? but first let’s look at how Google Analytics identifies most traffic sources automatically. We’ll take a look at how we can use UTM parameters to properly identity website traffic originating from email. They are particularly useful in measuring organic (unpaid) traffic sources that Google Analytics wouldn’t otherwise know about and for getting more granular detail about paid advertising campaigns. UTM parameters can be used to get a deeper level of insight into traffic coming to your site. ![]() The name stuck even after Urchin Analytics became Google Analytics. The Urchin platform tracked campaign traffic using these “urchin tracking modules” or “UTMs”. Google bought it and then re-released it as Google Analytics. UTM stands for “urchin tracking module.” The predecessor to Google Analytics was a company called Urchin Analytics. In the URL below everything in the red box (beginning with the “?” mark) are the appended UTMs. There are different utm parameters available in Google Analytics and each can be used to catalog your traffic in various ways. From here, digital marketers can analyze all of their campaign tagged traffic in one place. UTM parameters are used to track different marketing “campaigns”, like a specific email newsletter or a particular seasonal marketing effort, or even an A / B test on a paid ad.Ī click on a link with UTM parameters that then lands on a website, will be cataloged as “campaign” traffic in that website’s Google Analytics property. UTM parameters are additional pieces of tracking information appended to the end of a URL that can give Google Analytics detailed information about the specific way that the visitor arrived on the site. Whether you’re switching from from Universal Analytics to GA4, or entirely new to Google Analytics UTM parameters, this guide has you covered. They communicate with Google Analytics and can provide a great deal of helpful information for digital marketers that use them properly. UTM parameters are simply little bits of tracking information appended to the end of a URL in a link.
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