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One important part of marketing is measuring results. If you spend time, money and effort creating content and advertising, you will want to be able to measure your results. Whether you are working as a digital marketer and are asked to report on the results of your marketing activity, or if you are marketing your own business, you will want to track what worked and what didn’t. Measuring your results can help you to improve your efforts.
Driving traffic to your site or to a landing page on a site will be an important goal of your marketing activity. Traffic coming to your site is also referred to as in-bound traffic. To track how well your different activities are performing, you will want to know which pieces of content you posted, or ads you placed, were responsible for driving traffic to your site. You can achieve this by using UTM codes, a labeling system that allows you to evaluate your inbound traffic in more detail as it relates to your marketing activity.
So, what are UTM codes (or UTM parameters)?
UTM stands for “Urchin Tracking Module” — Urchin Software Corporation was acquired by Google in 2005 and their software became what we now know as Google Analytics.
UTM codes are labels that Google Analytics and other analytics tools can read and recognize. They consist of little snippets of text added to the end of your URL to help you track the success of your content on the web. An example of UTM codes is highlighted below:
