Tracking the effectiveness of your marketing efforts: using UTMs to make data-driven decisions
In this episode of Process to Profitability, I dive deep into the world of UTMs (Urchin Tracking Modules) and how they can revolutionize your marketing efforts. I share the step-by-step process of creating a UTM, explain why it's crucial for tracking the effectiveness of your marketing efforts, and reveal the key components to include in your tracking links. Through my own experience, I demonstrate how UTMs can provide valuable data for analyzing the success of specific promotions or events. Join me as I unravel the mystery of UTMs and empower you to make informed decisions for your business.
Timestamps:
[00:00:35] What is a UTM?
[00:01:49] How to use create UTMs
[00:02:43] The information to include when creating your UTM
[00:07:10] UTMs are the simplest way to gather data on how people are finding your website
[00:08:41] How you can use UTMs to make decisions in your business
[00:11:59] Connect with me and learn more about transforming your website with a VIP Day
Key Takeaways:
Utilizing UTM links for effective marketing tracking
Importance of tracking website referrals and analyzing data
Focus on profitability and target audience over follower count
Using analytics for clear and relevant marketing insights
Simplifying tracking efforts through UTMs
[00:00:00] Samantha Mabe: If you want a simple way to get really specific data on your website traffic and use that data to then make decisions about where you should be spending your time marketing and reaching out to people, today's episode is going to be a really powerful one.
[00:00:19] Today I am talking about UTMs. So those three little letters are some of the most intimidating that I have found online, and the reason is because we don't really understand how they work.
What is a UTM?
[00:00:35] Samantha Mabe: UTMs are a powerful tracking mechanism, a link that you or somebody else creates that then gives you very specific information from the people that click that link.
[00:00:49] For example, I have a UTM link in my Instagram bio that's actually for my links page. So if somebody goes to my Instagram and they click on Links to see all of the things that I talk about on Instagram, that link is not just my regular url, it's a UTM that includes extra information. And when I then go into my analytics for my website, that extra information tells me not, 'oh five people landed on your website today.' It tells me, 'four of those people came from your Instagram link where you were talking about this specific thing.'
[00:01:30] So what we are trying to do here is get information about where people are coming to your website from so that you can see what efforts are really working, especially when it comes to marketing.
How to use create UTMs
[00:01:49] Samantha Mabe: To start with, you can set up your own UTM creator. Or you can use a website that does it for you. It's pretty simple to get set up. The most important part is that you keep track of what you have created and that you use specific enough labels that when you go back into your data, that you can actually understand what it is that you put in.
[00:02:12] So if you just google UTM Creator, you are going to have lots of different options come up. You're going to enter the information. It's going to spit out a URL that you can then use as a link, embed it somewhere, hyperlink it through your text.
[00:02:29] And then what that's going to do is when someone clicks on that link, it's going to send all of that information to the backend of your analytics so that you can see all of that data.
The information to include when creating your UTM
URL
[00:02:43] Samantha Mabe: If you are looking at a UTM creator, you're gonna see a couple of things where you need to enter information. The first is going to be the URL of the page where your traffic is being sent. So this is going to be the full URL of your website or a specific page on your site.
[00:03:04] One thing to note here is because you can only see an analytics data from your website, these URLs need to be from your website. It doesn't help if your URL that you're entering here is the landing page that you created in Mailerlite or Flodesk for your newsletter because you don't have access to see who is clicking on those links. You would need to embed that form onto a page on your website that then you could send people to.
Campaign
[00:03:38] Samantha Mabe: The next thing that you're going to enter is a campaign. All of these different categories, there is no specific way you have to use them, you just need to figure out something that's going to work for you.
[00:03:50] But what I like to use campaign for is identifying a specific campaign, like a specific freebie that I'm promoting, a specific webinar, or a specific promo period, because what that's going to do is that's going to give me the biggest picture of what this is about that brought them to the page.
Source
[00:04:12] Samantha Mabe: Then you have a source. So this can be place where the visitor came from, so that might be ConvertKit or Mailerlite or Flodesk. If it's your email newsletter, it might be Instagram. It might be that you actually give somebody else who is linking out to your site at UTM so you could say that it's from this specific referral partner. And that's gonna give you information about not why they came, what drew them in, but how they got there, how they found you.
Medium
[00:04:45] Samantha Mabe: And then Medium is going to be a little bit more specific. So if you were to say this link was from Instagram on your source, your medium can go a one step deeper than that. You might say, 'okay, it's the link in my bio from Instagram', or 'it's the link that I shared on stories for Instagram', and that's just going to give you that next level of information that can then let you make decisions about, do I promote this thing more on stories or in my posts? Where are more people seeing and clicking through?
Content
[00:05:23] Samantha Mabe: And then you also have the ability to add content. So I only use this one if I am using a UTM in a specific blog post that I can use that blog post name. So when I linked my VIP Day application from a specific blog post, I include the name there so that I can see exactly which steps they took to click on that link. And I know which blog posts are performing really well, not in just how much traffic they get, but in how much they're actually converting people to the goal of my website, which is to get them to apply to work with me.
Term
[00:06:00] Samantha Mabe: There's also the ability to add a term. This is usually used for paid searches, and you can note the keywords for your campaign that you might have used so that you just get a little bit more information.
[00:06:15] Generally what you're going to need to make sure you include is obviously that URL. You have to tell it where it's they're going, the source, the campaign, and the medium.
[00:06:27] The more information you can put in all of these links, the better off you're going to be because when you go back and you look at that data, you are going to have lots there that you can dive into.
[00:06:43] The other thing I want to note just because it's something that I was not sure about at the first, is when you're creating this, you need to think about it like it's a URL, so there are no spaces. You're either gonna use a dash or an underscore to connect the words, because that is how the internet is going to read that data.
UTMs are the simplest way to gather data on how people are finding your website
[00:07:10] Samantha Mabe: Okay, so now you've got these set up, what do you do with them? I set UTMs up and I keep them in an Airtable database so that any time I am linking to a specific thing from a specific platform, I can use that link.
[00:07:27] So anytime I share about my VIP Day on LinkedIn, I go to the UTM that is made specifically for that. I copy it and I use that link. That way anytime somebody clicks on there, when I go into my data, at the end of the month, I can see, oh, I had three people click on my VIP Day application, who came specifically from LinkedIn.
[00:07:53] And that's a whole lot more helpful of information than just, oh, I had 27 people click on this link, but I have no idea where they came from. I have no idea what of the marketing efforts that I have put in actually worked for my business.
[00:08:08] And this is a whole lot simpler than putting together a separate opt-in form for every podcast or guest post that you do, which is what I used to do. So every time I would be a guest on a podcast, I would create a separate form, a separate link, so that they could go through and I had a way to track where they were coming from.
[00:08:30] This is a whole lot simpler because the page that you're going to is actually the same. All you are doing is giving a different link so that you can see that information.
How you can use UTMs to make decisions in your business
[00:08:41] Samantha Mabe: What do you do once you have that data? You have to look at it and you have to just make decisions based on that.
[00:08:46] So I look at my analytics once a month. I have switched from Google Analytics to Fathom Analytics because they do not sell your data and other people's data for ad revenue, you actually pay for the . To me, it feels a lot more aligned with what I value in my business, and the analytics in there are a lot less confusing, especially now that Google has moved over to G4 analytics. So there are less things that I can look at, but that's actually more powerful for me because I do not have to sift through what's important and what's not important.
[00:09:26] So when I get on my analytics, what I first look at is, I set my time range for the past month. I look at, okay, did I have more or less traffic to my website that month? Think about maybe, okay, why might that have been, did I not do as many promos? Was I not as active? Did I have a lot of guest episodes come out? And so it's higher traffic. It's just helpful to note what's going on and why you might be seeing some of these results.
[00:09:52] And then as I scroll down, I can actually look at UTMs. There's a whole section where I can then choose to look at it by. All of those fields that I entered: by campaign, by source, by medium, by content. And it will show me, okay, here's what that data is, here's how many people came to your site.
[00:10:13] So I can see, okay, I had 12 people come to my site through the VIP Day application link. Five of those were from Instagram, four of those were from LinkedIn. You know this, this many were from a guest episode of a podcast.
[00:10:32] And so what I can then do is look into that information and say, 'oh, well, it seems like Instagram is the best source of traffic that I have for my website. I am going to spend more of my time and effort marketing there.' or I might say Instagram isn't getting any clickthroughs, so I'm gonna actually spend more of my time and effort somewhere else, even if it's not the most popular platform.
[00:11:00] Because my goal in business is not to have a million followers or be an influencer. It's to be profitable and serve my clients. And so I have to spend my time, spend my effort showing up where those people are finding me and where it makes sense for the growth and trajectory of my business.
[00:11:24] I know this sounds really technical, but once you do it a couple of times and you have a database where you can keep this information, it's so simple to create a UTM, use that instead of just a generic link to your website, and then take some time at the end of every month or the end of every quarter, and look at what of those things that you have been doing in your marketing and in your work is actually paying off so that you know what to do moving forward.
Connect with me and learn more about transforming your website with a VIP Day
[00:11:59] Samantha Mabe: If you have any questions about this, send me a DM on Instagram. I'd love to connect about how you are using this and how you are using the data from your website analytics to make decisions about how you are going to market and run your business.
[00:12:15] And if you are interested in having me transform your website so that you can really have a strategy for when people land on that site to move them towards becoming clients of yours, let me know. We can work together during a VIP Day and I would love to chat about exactly how your website can help you convert your right fit leads into clients.
