How to Track Your Leads with UTM Parameters

How to Track Your Leads with UTM Parameters

Ultimately, UTM parameters will make your marketing strategy more efficient. In this guide, I’ll show you exactly how you can track leads with UTM parameters. From here, you’ll see simple instructions for creating a custom link to track your leads. Google Analytics has five potential parameters that you can add to each customized URL: campaign source campaign medium campaign name campaign term campaign content The source is used to identify exactly where the link is going to be embedded. So if you look at the example URL I built earlier, you would see I used a hyphen between the words lead and generation. Do NOT use UTM parameters to test links on your website While it may seem tempting and applicable, UTM parameters should not be used for internal linking within your website. So if you get new leads from your homepage, UTM parameters will be able to tell you which link they came from, right? Use your UTM parameters for all external sources outside of your website that generate leads. But this strategy isn’t effective if you can’t track the source of your leads. How is your business using UTM parameters to track new leads?

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No marketing strategy is complete without an effective lead generation strategy.

Those of you who are making a conscious effort to generate new leads are on the right track so far. But where are your leads coming from?

When you’re running multiple campaigns, how are you able to identify the source of your new leads? If you can’t answer these questions, read this guide.

UTM parameters will tell you exactly where the traffic from your digital marketing campaigns is coming from.

I’ve advised some marketers who haven’t implemented this strategy because they think it’s unnecessary. They see their site traffic increase, so they automatically assume this is the result of their lead generation campaigns.

While this may be true, you can’t make assumptions. The only way to know for sure is by putting your theory to the test.

According to the HubSpot’s 2018 State of Inbound Marketing report, getting leads and traffic are the top challenges faced by marketers.

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It’s obvious the majority of businesses can benefit from a strategy that helps improve their lead generation efforts.

Once you’re able to pinpoint your most effective marketing campaign, you can focus the majority of your efforts on that strategy.

On the flip side, you may also realize some of your lead generation strategies aren’t working at all. So you can stop wasting money on those by eliminating them completely, or you can decide to rework them with an improved approach.

Ultimately, UTM parameters will make your marketing strategy more efficient.

In this guide, I’ll show you exactly how you can track leads with UTM parameters. I’ll also give you some examples of ways you can implement these tactics.

Setting up your UTM parameters

Before we go any further, it’s time to show you how to set up a UTM parameter for your marketing campaigns.

To those of you who are unfamiliar with this, it may sound a little bit intimidating. But don’t worry, you’ll soon realize this is actually fairly easy.

Just navigate to the “Campaign URL Builder” option from your Google Analytics menu.

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From here, you’ll see simple instructions for creating a custom link to track your leads.

If you’ve only got a handful of marketing campaigns and you’re distributing them on a couple of channels, your custom URLs won’t be too complex.

But eventually, you should diversify your marketing efforts across as many channels as possible. That’s why it’s important for your UTM parameters to be very specific. It can help you stay organized in the long run.

Google Analytics has five potential parameters that you can add to each customized URL:

  • campaign source
  • campaign medium
  • campaign name
  • campaign term
  • campaign content

The source is used to identify exactly where the link is going to be embedded. This could be something like an advertiser, another website, or publication.

Email newsletters, banners, or CPC campaigns would all fall under the campaign medium category.

The campaign name is where you can be specific with your promotion. You could enter terms related to a slogan, promotional code, or something like “summer sale” to specify.

Campaign terms are for those of you who are paying for keywords. To keep track of any paid keyword promotions, you’ll want to include those words in this field.

Your campaign content parameter will help you separate similar links within the same promotion. For example, let’s say you have multiple CTA buttons within the same newsletter. You’d use this parameter to differentiate among them.

Here’s a look at an example I made to show you how this would look:

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I’m obviously using Quick Sprout as the example here, as you can see in the website URL field.

Based on my parameters, this link is going to be from an email newsletter about one of my lead generation campaigns. This link is specifically for the first CTA button in case I’m planning to have more than one in the same newsletter.

Once you fill out the fields, the Google Analytics tool will automatically generate a custom link for you. Here’s what the link looks like from the above example:

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As you can see, all of those terms are included in the link.

Once your link is live, all you need to do is copy and paste it for use in that specific campaign. Google Analytics will track all the data from each link.

Now, you’ll be able to see exactly how successful all of your various lead gen ads are.

Best practices for naming UTM parameters

Now that you know how to set up your parameters, I want to give you a little bit more insight on naming them.

Sure,…

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