Using UTM Codes to Measure Email ROI
With the rise of digital marketing, many of my colleagues seem to have forgotten the importance of calculating their ROI.
Perhaps justifiably, they feel that things are more complex than in the era of print media. Whether working with clients, agencies, or simply chatting with friends, I am floored by the number of marketing professionals who find it acceptable to stop after only measuring open rate. How could that possibly inform an investment decision? I can’t conceive of a campaign that would be best served by such a myopic view of customer or client engagement.
To those hordes of my overwhelmed peers, I would counter that the complexity across various platforms presents an opportunity for communication which has never existed before. Simply using UTM codes can add remarkable depth to your understanding of the manner in which your readers engage with your emails.
What is a UTM code you wonder?
Urchin Software Corporation was a pioneer in tracking URLs. They were acquired by Google back in 2005, before the behemoth of Mountain View was rebranded as Alphabet. Urchin Tracking Modules are tags appended to URL links and are both the core of Google Analytics and of this post. If you’ve ever clicked on a button and expected to land on a site with a quick and easy URL like emailsorcery.com, only to land on a monster of a link like https://www.emailsorcery.com/?utm_source=medium&utm_campaign=roi&utm_medium=exblog&utm_content=utm then you are familiar with UTM tracking in URLs.
UTM tracking is based on a series of parameters such as medium, campaign, and source. For the purpose of this article I will refer to individual parameters as UTM tags and the entire string of tags as a UTM code.
Let’s dissect the example above. Both links would take you to emailsorcery.com, but the second would provide me with data on several parameters. The links contains 4 UTM parameters.
- utm_source
- utm_campaign
- utm_medium
- utm_content
Medium is used to denote the medium from which the visitor was referred. For instance, a link on Facebook to your site would probably have medium=social. In the example above medium is set to exblog, shorthand for an external blog.
Source permits a more granular hierarchy of referring sources. In my example link above, source is Medium (this site, not utm_medium).
Campaign and Content (as well as term) allow you to track distinct campaigns on the same medium and/or source. Term is intended to keep track of paid search terms. As I’ve used them in the example link, perhaps I’m running a content marketing campaign on ROI and this particular article is about UTM tags.
Why bother?
Assuming you or your client are using Google Analytics on your website (assuming you have a website) as any sane businessperson would, UTM codes unlock a great deal of functionality and depth to the reporting you can run.
Let’s first look at how UTM tags can help you understand your audience.
By labeling your incoming traffic with these UTM tags, you can create custom segments. These segments are layers within GA’s standard reporting which you could use to break apart visitors from email to compare against visitors from social. You could do the same thing to look at variances in behavior between campaigns across the same media — perhaps folks who are attracted by an email coupon act differently than readers who engage with a quarterly newsletter.
Leveraging GA’s standard reporting dimensions, some of the first things you’ll be able to compare are time spent on site, bounce rate, and pages viewed. If you’ve previously set up goals and events, these metrics would allow you to measure such things as whether visitors from email purchase after spending less time on the site than visitors from organic search, which would indicated that your emails are qualifying leads and driving higher quality traffic to the site.
By digging into the behavior reports available in GA, you can identify patterns in site behavior across visitors from a certain medium. If, for instance, all of the visitors from email go directly to the pricing page, perhaps you could test including pricing information within the body of the email.
How can you measure the return on your emails?
If you have either events or goals in place which correspond to a sale or other transaction with a dollar value, then you can measure against these events by UTM parameter.
The first thing you’ll investigate is probably how many sales each channel is making. While it might seem basic, if you spend next to nothing on email and it is driving more sales than paid traffic from social or search, that would likely inform a business decision to divest from the other channels to some extent.
You could also determine whether visitors from a certain campaign or medium spend more than traffic from another source. Perhaps visitors from search cost more, but also spend more.
These are all simple reports to run once UTM codes are in place across your various inbound links.
Comment below with your favorite UTM attribution strategy or report.
Jonathan Escaliér is the Director of Business Development at EmailSorcery.com. In his free time, he enjoys SCUBA diving and hiking with his Aussie, Winston.
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