Best Practice For Setting UTM Parameters

What is a UTM parameter?

UTM parameters are strings of text added to the end of a URL. This string of text allows you to determine certain things about the traffic which arrives at the URL, such as what brought them there or even who they are.

For example, let’s say you’re running a display ad campaign on any platform; the link that takes people from your ad to your website might look something like this:

www.yourwebsite.com/?utm_campaign=yourcampaignname

In this case, the UTM parameter is ‘campaign’, and in place of ‘yourcampaignname’ would be the value you decided for the specific campaign that brought the visitor to the webpage.

Why are UTM parameters important?

Without UTM parameters, marketers are flying completely blind.

If you don’t know which marketing channel and specific campaign brings visitors to specific pages on your website, you have no way of evaluating the effectiveness of your marketing output. Adding UTM parameters allows you to measure marketing results so you can discontinue ineffective campaigns while putting more time and energy into successful ones.

Best practice for setting UTM parameters

Be consistent

Establish a system for setting UTM parameters. Remember that you’re going to have a lot of marketing campaigns in the future, so decide your approach early on.

For example, are you going to use dashes, or underscores? Will you use capital letters, or stay strictly lowercase? Will you identify specific campaigns by their date, by their content, by their intended audience, or by all three?

The goal is to have your naming conventions so solid that if you forget the UTM parameter of a specific campaign, you’d be able to guess it without looking it up.

Don’t use spaces

When you include spaces in UTM parameters, they become percentage symbols (%) in the URL. This complicates things, and leads to inconsistencies since Google doesn’t really like it.

Worse still, CANDDi simply won’t accept UTM parameters with spaces in them. So all your hard work setting UTM parameters would be wasted when you can’t use them to identify and segment your website visitors!

Build CANDDi streams using your UTMs

Using UTM parameters allows you to create CANDDi streams for specific marketing campaigns, which is a fantastic way of segmenting your data and discovering which marketing campaigns are driving the best results.

Alternatively, you can build Streams using the ‘source’ parameter, which allows you to keep an eye on all leads which come from a particular marketing channel. This is another great way to accurately measure the ROI of your marketing spend!