Is it possible to configure UTM tags yourself and monitor the effectiveness of advertising campaigns through channels right down to the key request? Absolutely, yes. But not everyone will dare try to do it, looking at a URL with markup for the first time. How do you make UTM tags, what’s important to know and consider?
UTM Tags: What Are They for?
The value of online advertising, be it a banner offering to play at a betting app or visit a new restaurant nearby, is that its effectiveness can be clearly tracked and digitized.
You need to know where your visitors come from and which channel generates more requests in order to use the best mix of promotion channels and build your sales funnel. All this can be done by UTM tags – elements of the site page code, tags that are put in the URL.
Web-analytics systems are capable of recognizing traffic sources, such as organic traffic, direct hits, social networks, e-mail mailing lists and so on. But to get the details of the source, if you place ads on third-party sites, you need to mark up the advertising links.
The UTM-tagged link contains the parameters used to identify the source of visits to the site and its value. The parameter is written first and its value is followed by an “=” sign.
Here are the main arguments for using UTM tags in digital campaigns:
- You don’t want to waste your advertising budget. You need to understand which channel brings more requests or sales, and which is better to be rapidly disabled, in order not to drain the budget.
- You want to build a detailed analytics system that takes into account all advertising channels and their contribution to the overall effectiveness of campaigns.
- In other words, if you want to be guided by data when planning your marketing, you cannot do without UTM tags.
UTM Tags Generators
The “formula” for UTM tags isn’t that complicated: the page address plus traffic tracking parameters. Everyone can create UTM tags, but if there are a lot of tags to be created, it becomes a chore. This means that you can inattentively make a mistake. To avoid mistakes, use special services that generate UTM tags automatically. Here are the main ones:
- Tilda. All you have to do is enter the URL of the page, choose a traffic source, and fill in the “Required Parameters” box. Tilda adapts tags for the main platforms, but you can also set your own source. At the bottom, in the “Result” field, the system will produce a ready-made link with the tags, which you only need to copy and use.
- Callibri. This tool generates UTM tags according to the same principles as the others. The difference is that there are more sources: there are also Instagram and Youtube. What’s more, there is a handy reference book of dynamic insertion parameters.
- Yagla. It’s another popular UTM tags generator. The same principle works: site address, traffic source and mandatory parameters. There is a window on the right with a video tutorial on configuring and analyzing the UTM tags. You can ask a question to a specialist in the chat room.
What to Do After the UTM Tagged Link Is Generated
- You need to check and make sure that the link works as intended. The thing is that sometimes a 404 error page may open on user clicks due to a security conflict. In this case, you need to contact support so that the admins prevent a conflict situation, and are allowed to use the UTM tag.
- Sometimes when additional tags are enabled, the link may have a long tail, which causes some inconvenience when sharing it in various advertising systems.
- Once you’ve checked the link, it’s time to place it in an advertising system, ad, campaign, banner or desired article.
Top 4 Popular Mistakes When Creating UTM Tags
- Excessive spaces. Under no circumstances should UTM tags be used. Some engines display spaces as %20 or %2B or replace them with “+”, which will inevitably lead to 404 error and failure of analytics systems.
- No “?” and “&” between tags. These are mandatory characters of the UTM label, if missing, the browser will produce a non-existent page.
- Typos in the tags. Metric simply won’t be able to understand what this mark is and won’t include it in the analytics. To avoid making such mistakes, save the names of tags somewhere, so you can just copy and paste them into your advertising source. Better yet, always use the automatic UTM tag generator, where all errors are minimized.
- One source of traffic you call differently. For example, in one link – google, in another – goog, in the third – Google. Metric won’t understand that it’s the same traffic source, and will analyze each separately. As a result, you will get confused and analyzing traffic channels will be problematic.
Summary
All in all, tracking advertising sources isn’t as difficult as it seems. It’s enough to master the structure and rules for configuring UTM tags. It’s unnecessary to have deep technical knowledge. You can also use UTM tags generators to mark up your pages, which is a guaranteed way to avoid mistakes.
Detailed source separation will allow you to analyze traffic and the funnel at the level of individual contextual queries or banners. Automated reports in web analytics systems make it as easy as possible.
