Follow us on Twitter
Grab the RSS feed
Campaign Tracking: The Basics
Cross-channel marketing measurement and optimization has been around in at least rudimentary forms for a while now. Urchin, which became what we know today as Google Analytics, supported and popularized a technique of URL tagging that allowed web analytics to speak the language of the marketer. These UTM tags allowed Urchin to record marketing campaign data alongside other analytics data, providing some insight into which efforts were producing results.
The world of web analytics certainly has evolved a great deal, but UTM tagging of campaign links remains an extremely important activity. New analytics like our own Performable Lifecycle Analytics offering use these same tag formats to associate browsing behavior to marketing campaigns.
Sarah Hodges of Counterpillar was kind enough to give us a nice introduction to the 5 UTM tags, which you can watch below or on iTunes.
To recap, there are 5 UTM tags:
- Campaign (utm_campaign)
- Medium (utm_medium)
- Source (utm_source)
- Term (utm_term)
- Content (utm_content)
Campaign represents your top-level, multi-channel marketing effort. Medium represents the channel in which the link is appearing. Source breaks Medium down, and commonly represents a particular traffic-driving property/site. Term is most often used in search marketing though it is available for creative use elsewhere. Content is commonly used in search marketing to identify ad copy, though it is also a great candidate to hold a custom parameter.
We’ll be continuing this series on URL tagging! Next up will be an explanation of how to tag your urls on a day to day basis, using the Performable Super URL Builder.
