What is UTM? UTM link building tutorial
Let me start this article with a question. We assume that our site, which we are working on, has more than thousands of IP visitors every day, and on the other hand, to increase sales and visits, we started to insert advertisements on sites, social networks, email marketing, etc. Now, how should we know how many clicks and visitors each of these ads have sent to us? How should we know how many clicks the campaign we launched to sell summer clothes has received during these three months and how many of these clicks led to purchases? To know these statistics, using the UTM link is the best option, as we can easily monitor the statistics.
In this training from Hostfa’s knowledge base, I am going to introduce what is UTM? How to create a UTM link? And I will discuss what UTM links will be useful for us. If you are also looking for UTM link creation, stay tuned to the end of this article.
What is UTM?
It is Urchin Tracking Module or UTM for short. Urchin was a software company that was purchased by Google in 2005, and the software they developed became what we know today as Google analytics, which allows viewing site statistics and checking all site data in the statistics section. We give UTM is actually a piece of code that by adding to the end of every link that we intend to track the statistics of the site and other reports, it will give us. This piece of code sends various information to the Google Analytics statistics system, where all this information is processed and after being identified and collected, it is provided to us in the form of a comprehensive report. Finally, by using these parameters that are in UTM, we can find out how many clicks and entries through advertising each banner we placed on a site, the newsletter we sent, or the summer campaign we had gave us in each time period.
The UTM link has several different parameters that can be used to determine whether the user who entered this link was created from the campaign or entered our site directly. If he entered from the campaign, which site did he enter from and which banner did he click on? Does the banner in the header give us the most clicks and input, or does the banner in the corner of the site or at the end of the content give us the most visits? All these questions that are stuck in your mind can be understood by using a few simple parameters.
First of all, see an example of a UTM link below.
https://mizbanfa.net/web-hosting/shared/europe-linux/?utm_source=mizbanfa-blog&utm_medium=banner&utm_campaign=blog&utm_term=hosting%2Bdomain&utm_content=header
As you can see, we have created a UTM link for Hostfa ‘s Europe pages. We are going to do a review for this page and see if the banner we put in the header has the most input or the banner placed in the corner of the site or at the end of the content gives us the most clicks and input. In the link above, after the question mark, you can see that a series of parameters have been defined, which UTM links have the following parameters.
- utm_source: This parameter shows where the input is coming from. For example, let’s assume that we only plan to advertise the summer clothing sales campaign on Telegram. Therefore, when we create the UTM link, we must select this value on Telegram. But because it is possible to advertise in several Telegram channels, so it can be entered as telegram-mizbanfa, which shows that the referral link is from the Telegram channel hosted by Fa.
- utm_medium: This parameter shows the media in what form the referral link is. For example, if the link is a banner, you should use the banner parameter. Or if your link is related to click ads, you should use cpc.
- utm-campain: This parameter also belongs to the general campaign that you implemented. For this example, summer sale can be used, which shows that the referral links are related to the summer sale campaign of clothes that you organized in the summer season.
- utm_content: This option is optional and it is like A/B testing that you can use for targeted ads with specific content. For example, if it is important for you to know that the user who came to the site came to the site with an ad on the header banner, or if he entered the site with an ad on the banner at the end of the content, you can get information from this parameter.
- utm_term: This option is also optional and can be used to specify the type of advertisement in the field of work to specify a specific keyword that is placed on special advertisements for the purpose of bidding. For example, in this summer campaign, clothing-shop can be used, which indicates a clothing store.
UTM link building tutorial
To create a UTM link, you can create the link manually using the above parameters or you can do this using an online tool. My suggestion is to do this manually so that you can better understand this type of link building and learn better. Therefore, to create this type of link, you must first follow some rules.
- You must use a question mark (in English) after the address of the page you want to link to.
- After each of the above parameters, you must use the = character to give the value and use the & character to separate each parameter.
- Do not use spaces to separate words and parameters, and if you have a phrase that needs to be separated, use a hyphen to separate them.
- Use the + character to use multiple keywords in the utm_term parameter.
Now, based on these rules, do the following to create a UTM link and enter the values for each parameter. In this example, I am going to create the same example of the link that I put above, the link of my page is https://mizbanfa.net/web-hosting/shared/europe-linux/.
- First, enter the link of the page you want to direct the ads to and add a question mark to the end of it in the English keyboard mode. So, in the first step, my link is https://mizbanfa.net/web-hosting/shared/europe-linux/? comes out
- parameter I add the utm_source= to the end of the link and enter the value for the input source. Here, my banner is in the knowledge base, so I use an expression like mizbanfa-blog, and finally my link is https://mizbanfa.net/web-hosting/shared/europe-linux/?utm_source=mizbanfa-blog comes out
- Now, because I want to add other parameters, I have to use the & character to separate each parameter, so by adding my link https://mizbanfa.net/web-hosting/shared/europe-linux/?utm_source=mizbanfa -blog& comes out.
- At this stage, it is time to specify the utm_medium parameter, which I need to specify the grandchild of the advertisement. So, after the character & in the previous step, I enter the parameter utm_medium= and after the character = I select the value of my ad in the form of a banner on the banner. So far my link will be https://mizbanfa.net/web-hosting/shared/europe-linux/?utm_source=mizbanfa-blog&utm_medium=banner.
Now, in the same way, and following the points mentioned, I will set the rest of the parameters, and finally my link will be as below.
https://mizbanfa.net/web-hosting/shared/europe-linux/?utm_source=mizbanfa-blog&utm_medium=banner&utm_campaign=blog&utm_term=hosting%2Bdomain&utm_content=header
If it is difficult for you to do this manually, you can create a link by visiting the Campaign URL Builder page . In this link, similar to the image below, it is enough to first enter the page link in the Website URL field, and then enter the information of each parameter in each field based on the explanations I gave, so that finally the output of the link is generated in the Share the generated campaign URL field, which is copied You can use this link for your campaign.
What information does the UTM link give us?
So far, you have familiarized yourself with the 5 parameters of this type of link creation, of which the first three are necessary and the last two are optional. Now you may have a question about what information these links can provide us with each click. ? With the specified parameters, what details can we get from the advertisement that we gave in different places? It is said that UTM mainly answers three questions, and I think that everyone who is active in the field of digital marketing spends most of his activities answering these three questions.
- Where did the traffic and clicks come from?
- How did the user who reached my site using the UTM link get here?
- Why did the traffic reach me?
Despite these three questions, it also gives us information such as the number of pages viewed by the user, the time spent on the site and the host’s bounce rate. But how is this information sent to the Google statistician and how can we see this information?
In order to be able to view the links created and view the results of UTM entries, we must have an account in Google Analytics. In addition, you must have used the Google Analytics statistician, for this purpose you can use the articles on how to install and activate Google Analytics on the site and how to insert the Google Analytics code in WordPress , which can be displayed in any content management system. In addition to WordPress, it is also used. After logging in to the Google Analytics user account, you can view the UTM results from two sections. Go to the following paths to view the statistics.
