What is an Urchin Tracking Module and why should you start using it now?
WHAT DOES URCHIN MODULE STAND FOR?
UTM stands for the Urchin Tracking Module, which is a bit of a mouthful. Urchin was originally a web analytics software, developed by Urchin Software Corporation and designed to track the behavior of unique website visitors. Google bought it in 2005 and the acquisition led to the creation of Google Analytics, which became the most popular web data analytics tool across the internet.
Nowadays, the Urchin Module tagging is an analytics tool used by marketers to track the impact of their online marketing efforts, better understand their audience’s behavior, and measure performance. For instance, UTM tags allow you to discover which channels bring the most sales conversions to your website.
It’s made up of tags (also called modules or variables), which you add to the end of a link, to track and analyze the given page’s traffic sources. When a person clicks on the given link, these parameters are sent back to Google Analytics and will appear in the different Analytics dashboards. The analytics system, therefore, allows you to specifically track where your visitors come from.
WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS OF USING THE URCHIN MODULE?
By using UTM tags, you will be able to track the number of new and returning visitors, the bounce rate, conversion and the detailed social media performance of your traffic.
For example, let’s say you just published a new blog post. You want to share this post in several Facebook groups and understand which group’s members reacted well to your posts.
You can do this by posting UTM links to the Facebook groups and then later analyze the detailed results in Analytics. Your reports can become as detailed as figuring out which group’s visitors paid the most visits to your post or which group’s members were the most engaged. Later on, you can use this data to build a stronger strategy and optimize your resources.
But there is also a less known benefit: Urchin Module tagging helps you to get rid of dark social traffic. In the case of dark social traffic, Google Analytics can’t identify the source of your traffic due to technical reasons.
What happens when you send your blog post to a group on WhatsApp? Once the group members click the link, Google Analytics will sense the traffic and add the visitors to your numbers but it won’t be able to understand the source of the traffic since WhatsApp encrypts the messages. As a result, the visits from the WhatsApp group will fall into the direct, unknown, or (not set) category.
Unknown traffic can occur for several reasons, including sharing the link in messaging apps, emails, and even SMS text messages. When it comes to analyzing your website traffic, using UTM parameters will help you tackle all of these analytics challenges.
HOW DOES URCHIN MODULE TAGGING WORK?
Through this data analytics tool you can track five things by using 5 distinct parameters:
utm_source
What is the source of your traffic? (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, etc.)
utm_medium
What is the medium through which your audience ended up on your website? (e.g. social, mail, etc.)
utm_campaign
Which campaign attracted your audience? (e.g. Summersale2017)
utm_content
Which content works best for your post? (e.g. differentiate between two CTA texts)
utm_term
Which paid term brought you the most traffic? (e.g. if you have paid campaigns you can specify the keyword you used)
The above 5 parameters are the variables you are using when you are creating a UTM tagged link. You must add source, medium and campaign, while content and term are optional.
So how do you create a UTM tag actually? There are actually several ways:
MANUALLY
Let’s see a basic example with only 3 parameters: your link is “https://www.utmthings.com”, you shared a post on Facebook and you used it to promote a discount on the software package you are selling.
Your parameters will be the followings:
Your UTM tagged link will look like this:
https://www.utmthings.com/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=softwarediscount2017
CAMPAIGN URL BUILDER BY GOOGLE
A super simple service by Google. You just enter the parameters into the field and the system gives you the ready-to-go link. Don’t forget about using consistent parameters, though! The tool even provides you explanations. They created the same service for Android (Google Play URL Builder) and iOS (iOS Campaign Tracking URL Builder ) apps.
Additionally, there are some services, mostly for social media, which create UTM tracking automatically, such as Buffer or Amplifr.
But there are a couple of things you should pay attention to when creating your own custom UTMs!
Don’t confuse source and medium
Based on their name it is not completely evident which one to use. Your source is always the platform’s name (e.g. facebook, newsletter) and the medium is the type of platform (e.g. social, mail).
Consistent tagging
When naming your parameters, you should use consistent tagging! Be careful because Facebook will be different from facebook.com and google is not the same as Google, with a capital letter, in this case.
The link
You should use the full link, with https:// at the beginning, and never forget the / at the end! As an example, we don’t put simply “intellyo.com” instead we use the full link, such as “https://www.intellyo.com/”
Spaces
Instead of spaces, you should use “_” or “+” as the former option won’t be recognized by the system. So, for instance, when thinking about parameters, don’t use “facebook ad”, instead use “facebook_ad” or “facebook+ad”.
Separate the parameters from the URL with a question mark
When creating your custom UTM tag, you add the full link + ? + parameters. The link should be separated from the parameters with a “?”, such that: https://www.link.com/?parameter_1...
List the values and pairs separated by an equal sign
To each UTM value (utm_source, utm_medium, etc.), you assign a pair (facebook, social, etc.), just like I did in the manual method above. These should always be separated with a “=”, which indicates that the utm source equals facebook, for example. So, like this: https://www.link.com./?utm_source=social...
Shorten the link
Long links in your posts, on social media, for instance, are annoying for your audience and might significantly decrease your click-through-rate. You should definitely use a link shortener service like goo.gl or even better, you can create your own customized short link!
The process is quite simple. First of all, you have to buy a short domain, for example, google.com bought goo.gl or bit.ly instead of bitly.com
After the purchase, register on bit.ly and add your custom short domain to the system. It only takes a few simple steps and instead of using super long links the one you post will simply look something like goo.gl/Kjsj2Uw (but with your own domain name instead of goo.gl, of course).
Order?
It doesn’t matter what order do you use when adding the parameters as long as you pay attention to the other rules.
HOW TO MAKE SENSE OF THE RESULTS?
Now that you understand what does UTM stands for and how to assemble a UTM tagged link, you can check the results through Google Analytics. As a matter of fact, the most useful are Acquisition and Conversion report. Below, I have added some example questions and the steps to find the answers. The more you are using this tool, the more you will discover within your own data analytics tool.
Which social channel performs the best for your website?
Acquisition > Campaigns > All campaigns > Primary dimension set to Source/Medium
Which campaign performs the best?
Acquisition > Campaigns > All campaigns > Primary dimension set to Campaign
By playing around with the Campaigns in GA you will be able to discover the number of (new) users and their habits. For instance, most of the audience of the Intellyo blog is converting through our social campaigns and our visitors from Reddit are the most engaged with only a 27.78% bounce rate.
