UTM parameters - Lifeline of every Marketer

Are your social media Ads successful? ​

This is a question that, we marketers, tend to ask ourselves quite often. Determining whether your Facebook/Google Ads are suitable for your business isn’t straight forward. Imagine you run a successful campaign across Google, Facebook and Email for a week, only to discover during the performance analysis that you are unable to identify/differentiate the traffic generated by each channel. Now the learning from this campaign can’t be reused for the subsequent ones. Hence, configuring the customer path becomes critical to be able to identify and compare between various marketing channels. That is where the UTM parameters come into picture to save the day.

Campaign measurement​

UTM parameters facilitate the path definition by clearly marking the traffic origination (advertising channels like Facebook, Instagram, Criteo, Google Adwords) and destination (desirably a successful sale). Once these are rightly configured, marketers can clearly see the entire customer flow. Thereafter one can make use of standardized metrics like return over ad spend (ROAS), customer acquisition cost (CAC), click through rate (CTR) to take decisions on budget allocations. 

Auditing the Ad traffic from various channels​

UTM parameters also facilitate to monitor whether the traffic is being appropriately directed to the landing page, from the ‘pageview’ events captured in Google Analytics. If the marketers notice a huge gap between the number of clicks in the Ad channel and the corresponding traffic captured in GA (as sessions), then it definitely is a cause of concern. Immediate action would be to check if the url link given in the advertising copy is non-functional (whether users are landing into 404 page) or utm parameter configuration is incorrect.

Re-marketing for Customers​

Also, as the funnel metrics can be tracked and attributed to each channel, re-marketing becomes easy. If more cart abandonments happen due to facebook originated traffic, Fb Dynamic Ads can be configured to re-target those customers. In case a considerable number of users are dropping off at the checkout login step, social login option can be introduced to facilitate the users not to go through the whole registration process.

Mitigating Ad Spend Losses​

Hence, rightly configured UTM parameters not only allow to monitor the campaign performance, but also help the marketers in deciding when to call-off or change strategy of certain messaging. This will help mitigate any unnecessary traffic loss resulting in the wastage of Ad spends and make necessary changes on-the-go instead of waiting to measure the campaign post its completion.

Also monitoring and analyses become effortless and automatic using our integrated reporting solution Halo, as the data pull, mapping and data refresh happens regularly. To know more about it, please register for a demo here. 

Never again waste marketing efforts over a simple yet misunderstood technical detail like UTM parameters. Refer below for configuring UTM parameters through

• Facebook
• Google Analytics

Happy Marketing !!