Okay, starting with a couple of assumptions.
1. You care about knowing where your website traffic is coming from and finding better places from which to get it.
2. You have, or are willing to get, Google Analytics (GA) setup on your site.
If you are putting links in social media or paid advertising, you should be tagging everyone of them to understand where your best traffic is coming from. Setting up social postings? Tag them. Adding UTM parameter values lets you see what content is driving engagement.
Most companies that use the UTM parameters do so with paid media, but neglect tagging social messaging and email. I’d even recommend applying the tags to links from your social profiles.
So, what is the UTM code and where does it goes? The parameters and values are appended to your landing page urls.
http://shop.volcom.com/Boardshorts/mens-boardshorts.html?utm_campaign=boardshorts_b&utm_medium=email&utm_source=members&utm_content=bs2_copy2
You have to add the “?”, then add the parameters=value with an ampersand between them.
Below is an example of how a campaign may be structured.
| utm_campaign | utm_medium | utm_source | utm_content | term |
| boardshorts_a | ppc | textad1 | term1 | |
| boardshorts_a | ppc | yahoo | textady1 | term1 |
| boardshorts_b | display_premium | espn | bs1_480x55 | |
| boardshorts_b | display_dsp | dataxu | bs1_480x55 | |
| boardshorts_b | display_dsp | adroll | bs2_480x55 | |
| boardshorts_b | members | bs2_copy1 | ||
| boardshorts_b | members | bs2_copy2 |
In Google Analytics you can view performance on any of these parameters (called dimensions in GA). You can compare different campaigns, sources, ads, etc for goals or engagement. If you have eCommerce set up, you can track the revenue as well.
Once you are in the habit of adding UTMs to your destination urls, you will start to see a wealth of information that you can use to direct your resources and focus.
https://fanaticallydigital.com/analytics/