UTM tracking
UTM tracking, and the point where it stops being enough.
UTM parameters are five labels you add to a link so your analytics can group visits. They are free, universal and worth using properly — and they cannot tell you what a click cost or which sale it caused.
There are five: source, medium, campaign, term and content. They travel in the URL, they are read by analytics tools, and they answer one question — roughly where did this visit come from. For organic sharing, email and newsletters they are usually all you need.
Paid traffic breaks them in two ways. First, they describe a visit, not a click, so nothing in them says what you paid. Second, they group: every visitor from one campaign carries the same tag, which means you can compare campaigns but never one placement against another, and you can never tie one particular sale back to one particular click.
The fix is not to abandon them. Keep the UTMs for your analytics, and add a click id — a unique value per click — that your tracker issues and your affiliate network hands back when the sale is approved. The tags describe the traffic; the id identifies the visitor.
The other thing worth being strict about is naming. utm_source=facebook, Facebook and FB are three rows in every report forever. Pick lower case, pick one word per thing, and write it down somewhere the whole team can see.
How it works
The mechanism, not the marketing.
- 01
Five parameters
source, medium, campaign, term and content, appended to your destination URL.
- 02
They are read on arrival
Analytics stores them against the session so visits can be grouped later.
- 03
They do not carry money
Nothing in a UTM says what a click cost or what it earned. That has to come from somewhere else.
- 04
A click id does the rest
One unique value per click, passed to the network and returned on the sale.
What to check tonight
You can do all of this without us.
None of it needs an account anywhere. If it turns out your tracking is fine, you have lost twenty minutes and learned something.
Look for three spellings of one source
Open your source report and count the variants of the same network. Each one is a decision made on a third of the data.
Check your tags survive the redirect
Some shortening and redirect services drop query strings. Click your own link and read the address bar on the page that opens.
Try answering a placement question
Ask which site inside a native campaign made money last week. If your UTMs cannot answer it, that is the wall, and it is where a tracker starts.
Write the convention down
Lower case, no spaces, one word per concept, agreed once. It costs nothing and it saves every report you will read next year.
How UTMCAP does it
What you would get here.
Tokens filled in for you
A tracking URL comes out with the network’s own macros already in it, for 25 traffic sources.
Ten sub parameters
Beyond the five UTMs: sub1 to sub10 for whatever each network sends, each one groupable in reports.
A click id of your own
Issued per click, passed onward, returned on the sale. External ids from nine ad platforms are stored beside it.
Cost on the click
Read from the URL when you say so and clamped to a ceiling, so a public link cannot inflate your spend.
Grouping that does not stop at five
Forty fields, five levels deep, including every sub parameter.
Your UTMs still work
Pass them through to your lander as usual — analytics keeps working, and the tracker holds the money half.
Questions
The ones people ask next.
Read next
- Do UTM parameters affect SEO?
- Not on ads. On pages you link to yourself, tagged URLs can create duplicate addresses, which is what canonical tags are for. For paid traffic sent to a lander, it is not a concern.
- What is the difference between a UTM and a click id?
- A UTM is a label shared by every visitor in a campaign. A click id is unique to one click. You need the label to group and the id to attribute a sale.
- Can I keep using Google Analytics as well?
- Yes, and most people should. Analytics tells you about behaviour on your site; the tracker tells you what each click cost and earned. Neither replaces the other.
Point a domain at us and run a click through it.
The free plan takes a hundred thousand clicks a month and no card. If it does not do what you need, you have lost twenty minutes.