Are you curious exactly where your traffic is coming from? Does Google Analytics not give you enough details for A/B testing campaigns and links? Use UTM Codes to follow the buyer’s journey from all of your marketing into your funnel and conversion goals. Here’s a tutorial to teach you how to build Free UTM URLs for tracking website traffic.
Another cool tutorial on UTM Tracking Codes
Video Transcript
Hey y’all, my name is Kori Ashton and I know that you have been working really hard to try to figure out how to track all of those different points of advertisement that are bringing traffic to your WordPress website, right? You’ve been looking and thinking okay, that email campaign that I did, I can see that it was opened at this rate, and I can see even which users opened them, and I can even see how many clicked on something, but how do I know which one of those actually drew in the sale at the end of the day, right? How do we follow the buyer’s journey all the way through our website and know which Facebook campaign actually converted better? How are you tracking those things? Well, there’s actually a free tool that you can use to do it. I’m gonna show you how to do it all right now.
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Tracking Traffic with UTM Codes
All right, let’s get to the tutorial. It’s time to learn about UTM codes. So if you’ve ever seen a URL path that looks like this, this has UTM tracking inside of it. UTM is Urchin Tracking Module. You’ve also probably heard it called tracking parameters, or tracking tags. These UTM tags allow us to track five different things. I’m gonna walk you through what those look like, but let’s break down this URL first so you kind of understand what you’re looking at.
Obviously, this right here is the root domain name or the page that you want this link to go to. Then you’ve got a UTM source living inside of here. This is the first parameter that we’re using. We’re asking for the source of this particular link traffic, right? Where did my traffic come from? Where’s the source of this traffic? Where were we using this link? This says newsletter.
You can track all sorts of stuff. Here’s another UTM parameter saying the UTM medium is the email, the UTM campaign is the SEO tips, and the UTM content is the call to action button. You’ve got five different parameters that you can track. Those five different parameters are campaign source, campaign medium, campaign name, campaign term, and campaign content. Now, this particular resource that I’m giving you is actually the free resource that helps you build those URLs easily and quickly. They type it all in for you and make certain that you don’t miss any characters whatsoever. All you have to do is answer the questions and kind of fill in the blanks here and it’ll start to build it for you.
So, let me walk you through first of all what they are and then I’ll build a sample URL. So the campaign source, this is required if we’re gonna use any UTMs. This is the base one that will be required, the medium is required, and the campaign name.
And then the term and the content will be optional. But the campaign source is used to identify the search engine, newsletter name, or other source. Example, Google, right? So we’re gonna do an example up here using Facebook.
The campaign medium. This is the UTM medium uses to identify the email or maybe the cost per click, whatever medium is being used inside of that source. So for us, it’s just gonna be a regular post that we’re going to do, right?
And then this is also the one that’s required, the UTM campaign. This is used to identify a specific product or promotion or strategic campaign. So the example that they’re giving here is spring sale. So you can use something if you’re running a certain campaign for donations or for a particular product that you want to highlight, the campaign term would be to note a keyword for this ad. So if you’re trying to go after a specific key term, you can add that inside of there.
And then the campaign content, I think this one is really key to use as well because this one allows you to differentiate between ads or links if they’re in the same type of document. So for like an email campaign, if you have different links, you can track this specific link inside that document that brought you the most traffic, so it’s a really cool tool here.
Let’s go up here and build one out, and I’ll show you how to use it. So, website URL. This is the link that you want them to land on. So if you have an internal landing page, this can go anywhere to a active link online. The campaign source. For us right now, I’m gonna go ahead and use Facebook. The campaign medium. So this is cost per click, banner, email, you can put whatever you want to inside of there.
I’m actually going to list the Facebook page I’m going to put this on so I can track whichever page this is coming from. So I’m gonna say this is coming from Ask Kori page. And the campaign name. Remember, these are the required three fields that you have to have after your URL. So, we’ve got to fill it out and put something in there that makes sense for us.
Is this a product, is this a promo code, is there a slogan? What do we need to put in here to help us again better understand where this traffic is coming from? I’m gonna put on here SEO tips. And then you can add in keywords. And you can add in campaign content if you want to differentiate those ads. And for this one, I am gonna go ahead and say that this one was an organic ad, that basically I didn’t promote. This is just an organic ad that I was just gonna post on my Facebook page. That’s it, you guys. It has built out the link for me.
How to Use UTM Tracking Codes
Now here’s the cool part. We can take that link and use it like a regular link anywhere you want. Anywhere, on any social network, inside of Twitter, whatever we wanted. If we need it to have a shorter link, you can do that. You do have to have the authorization required, so basically you just need to log in, create an account. But for free, we can grab this link right here and we’re off and running.
We can put that behind a text link, behind an image, we can put it in a post. It doesn’t matter. We can use it anywhere we want and it allows us to completely track where that traffic came from. So let’s take that link and jump into our Facebook. Here I am, inside of my Facebook page for Kori Ashton. You can come down here and just like you would in adding in any other regular link, you would be adding it here. And then you say something like, check out my toolbox for really great SEO tools and tips. And I’m pasting in that URL. Yes, it looks lengthy and that’s fine.
People are still gonna click on it, it’s no big deal. But look, it’s gonna render it just like it normally would. It brought over everything, brought over my image, brought over this snippet, and it’s going to work perfectly. Let’s go ahead and scroll down here and click Post. And then what we wanna do is we wanna click on it and jump over to that website and see how it’s gonna bring it over in the path and help us land in that exact spot that we wanted to bring that traffic to. Check this out.
There it is here, click, out we go. There’s my toolbox. Let me pull this down so you can sneak a peek at that path. Look at that, you guys. It brought over that whole beautiful link. So now, that link’s gonna be showing up inside of my Google Analytics. And I can pull that and source that any which way to better understand where all my traffic is coming from.
Another cool tutorial on UTM Tracking Codes.
So as you can see, you can resource that free Google tool, create those little extensions onto your regular domain link, right? Whatever URL you already have, you just tack it on there, and you’re off and running, you guys. You can track anything, whether you’re doing it for yourself, or you’re helping a client set that up, where the clients now know and have that clarity of exactly which campaign they’re running converts perfectly. And you can do that with a lot of different tools, again, totally for free, just like the one I showed you. How cool is that?
I hope this helps you. If you’re interested in more stuff like this, I’ve got over 400 videos on this YouTube channel. Be sure to check them out, put a comment in the description box below. I’d love to talk to you. Let me know how you’re using this tracking and how it’s worked for you.
All right, hope this helps y’all. I will see y’all next WordPress Wednesday. Please be sure to like and subscribe. Bye, you guys!
