UTM parameters are really important to track your marketing efforts. Fortunately, HockeyStack shows you your UTM links inside the dashboard under sources without any effort.
Why Do You Need UTM Parameters?
UTM parameters help website owners uncover the "dark" traffic.
The majority of the traffic comes from "direct".
Dark traffic includes clicks from emails, from docs like this one, from mobile messengers, bookmarks, people typing in the URL directly into the browser, websites that don't give analytics tools a referrer, such as Discord, and much more. Site owners cannot see which referrer sources are sending that traffic.
With UTM parameters, you will be able to differentiate one from the other.
How Do I Use UTM Parameters?
To create your UTM parameters, you can use a website like UTM Builder.
On UTM Builder and HockeyStack dashboard, you see UTM Source, Medium, and Campaign.
Let me explain them:
UTM Source:
The name of the campaign source where you plan to share the link.
Such as Facebook, Google, Reddit, etc.
The utm_source parameter is required as it's the most important part of the tracking.
UTM Medium:
While Source determines where the visitor came from, Medium is how they arrived at your site. For example, one visitor can come from a blog post from Facebook while another can come from an ad from Facebook. It’s the group or category of the source. Examples include:
- Social
- Email Newsletter
- CPC
- Affiliate
UTM Campaign:
The name that you give to the campaign. For example:
- Black+friday+sale
- December+sale
- Special+limited+time+offer
UTM campaign allows you to remember your campaign. After 6 months, you might want to look at your campaigns, and the only way that you can differentiate one Facebook ad from the other will be the name that you give to them.
Use Cases
So I have mentioned that the main benefit of UTM parameters is the ability they give to uncover "direct" traffic so that you can improve your marketing effort.
Now, I will give some use cases.
Sales Funnels
If your ads are for one goal, such as add to cart, sign up, etc., you can create a funnel and duplicate it.
After duplicating the funnel, you can change the first "view" step with different UTM links and compare your marketing campaigns.
This way you will uncover how people from different traffic sources behave and where they drop off so that you can improve your advertisement/marketing campaigns.
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Compare Organic and Paid Campaigns
After creating your goals, you can click on them to see the referrers of people who completed your goal.
You can understand if your organic or paid campaigns work better so that you can spend your precious time on one of them and maximize your conversion rate.
Compare Results of Individual Social Media Posts
After writing your blog, you probably have a list of Facebook groups, Subreddits, Quora questions, etc. to distribute your article. How will you know whether one Facebook group is better than the other one? UTM parameters got you covered.
You can create parameters for different groups and compare them so that you can distribute more to those groups and spend more time on those groups.
Compare Your Sponsorships and Guest Blogs
If you have sponsored 2 newsletters or wrote articles for different blogs as a guest blogger, you can create different UTM parameters for them and compare the results on HockeyStack and get a better bang for your buck!
Additional Resource
If you have any other questions or issues, you can always reach us through the live support or just sending an email to hello@hockeystack.com!