Tag a link before you post it, and your analytics tells you where every visitor came from. Fill in the fields and the tagged link builds as you type.
Paste the page as it appears in your browser.
That address cannot be read
The site or the list. facebook, google, newsletter, whatsapp.
The kind of link, not the place. social, email, cpc for a paid ad, referral for a link on someone else's site.
The promotion or the push these links belong to, so a month of results groups itself.
Use it when the same campaign has two links and you want to know which one people clicked.
Only for ads you are bidding on a keyword for. Leave it empty otherwise.
Fill in the address and the source and the link appears here.
Analytics treats Winter Service and winter-service as two different campaigns, so tags are lower-cased and hyphenated for you.
Someone books a job. Your analytics says they came from Facebook. It cannot say whether that was the post you paid to promote, the one you wrote on Tuesday, or the link in your profile — because all three arrive looking identical. So the ad that works and the ad that does not both read as “Facebook”, and next month you spend the same on each.
A UTM tag is the fix, and it is just text on the end of the link. You add ?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=winter-service to the address before you post it. The page loads exactly as it would have. But your analytics now reads those tags and files the visit under that campaign, and the two Facebook posts stop being one number.
UTM stands for Urchin Tracking Module, after the analytics tool Google bought in 2005. Google Analytics reads the five tags below, and so does almost every other analytics tool, because they were the ones everybody standardised on.
facebook, google, newsletter.
utm_medium
What kind of link it is. This is the one people get wrong: it is the channel, not the place. social, email, cpc for anything paid, referral for a link on someone else's site.
utm_campaign
What you are running. Every link for the same push gets the same value, so the whole thing reports as one line. winter-service.
utm_content
Which of two links it was. Same campaign, same page, two places to click — the button at the top and the link at the bottom. header-button.
utm_term
The keyword you paid for. Only used on paid search. Leave it empty everywhere else.
Source alone tells two links apart. Source, medium and campaign cover nearly everything a small business runs — content and term are there for the days you need them.
They sit after a question mark, which is where a web address carries extra information. The page loads exactly as it would without them and ignores anything it does not recognise.
They show in the address bar, so keep the values plain. A client who reads winter-service learns nothing about you; one who reads cheap-leads-test-3 learns more than you meant.
Under Acquisition, where the traffic sources are listed. Your source, medium and campaign values appear there as their own rows, usually within a day of the first click.
Tagging one of your pages to another restarts the visit, so someone who arrived from a paid ad is counted twice and the ad loses credit for the booking. Tag only what brings people in from elsewhere.
Tagging the links is the easy half.
Knowing which one brought the job in is only useful if something happens next — the lead gets answered, followed up and booked without you holding the phone. That is the part we build.
Book a callThat button is tagged too: ?utm_source=techanisms&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=utm-generator&utm_content=page-footer. Source is where the link lives, medium is the kind of link, campaign is the page it sits on.