UTM Codes: What They Are and How to Use Them for Digital Marketing

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If you are a digital marketer, blogger, or even someone who uses Pinterest for business purposes, UTM codes have the potential to be your best friend. Utilizing them will allow you to track where traffic is coming from and how it impacts conversions on your website. This blog post will discuss what UTM codes are and just how they can help you with SEO marketing!

What Are UTM Codes? UTM Tracking Explained

Urchin Tracking Module (UTM) codes are snippets of code attached to the end of a URL. UTM codes help you identify top-performing content based on your marketing goals. They are also used to pinpoint specific a traffic source to your website. When used correctly, UTM tracking is one of the most powerful tools in your data analytics tool kit.

A UTM code is a snippet of code that you can add to the end of a URL to track the performance of campaigns and content. There are 5 variants of URL parameters you can track – source, medium, campaign, term and content.

The code only serves one purpose: to help your analytics tool track the source of your visitor. It can also be used to help you drill down into specific pages and posts within these traffic sources. The UTM codes are also known as UTM parameters, or tracking tags.

UTM codes give you a higher level of information about your traffic so you know what is working and what isn’t. UTM codes are made up of five sections but four of them are the most important:

• The first section identifies the medium (such as ‘twitter’) that you want to track,
• The second section tracks how many people were sent from that source (e.g., 25)
• The third part tells us the campaign associated with the code (e.g., ‘fall-in’ campaign)
• The fourth section is the unique ID or URL that you want to track (i.e., your blog post’s permalink).

UTM codes are a great way for digital marketers to measure and evaluate their campaigns in order to find out what content is performing best and what may need some tweaking.

What can you track with UTM codes ?

There are five different UTM parameters: Source, Medium, Campaign Term and Content. The first 3 are by far the most used parameters, but for additional insights you may also choose to track all 5.

Source: The URL of the website from which a visitor came or sources of traffic. This can be your own domain or one you just found on Google and linked to

Medium: The type of medium through which a user arrived at your site, such as ‘organic’ (meaning they found it organically in search results) or ‘referral traffic’ (they clicked a link somewhere else, such as on Facebook) or to identify specific social traffic when used on social media posts

Campaign: The name of the campaign (e.g., ‘Acme Campaign’) you’re running to generate traffic to your site.  The campaign parameter is a required field and if you want to carry out campaign tracking, it is very useful

Term: The keyword term associated with the campaign such as ‘UTM Codes’ for this post.  The term parameter isn’t a required field

Content: This might be something about the content of the specific link such as ‘tall pin July 2021’ as a description for a UTM code used on a pin. That way you know that the traffic can be attributed to a specific pin when you look further into the data

How Do I Create My Own UTM Codes?

Google offers a handy Campaign URL Builder tool that walks you through how to create customized tracking URLs. The tool also defines each of the UTM parameters, in case you need a refresher.

We recommend shortening your URL before sharing, since UTM codes can make your URL unappealing to click on. Google’s Campaign URL builder tool offers Bitly integration and is compatible with Google Maps and other apps like Facebook and Google Maps. 

How to track your social media UTMs in Google Analytics

Google Analytics makes it really smooth for organizing and analyzing these UTMs. You can see UTM campaign, source, and medium all from the same Google Analytics dashboard.

And once you’ve been tagging and tracking your links with UTMs, you can get a really good feel for where your traffic is coming from by hopping into Google Analytics.

To find the data, go to your Google Analytics account > Acquisitions > Campaigns > All Campaigns

In this example, you can see campaigns such as Tailwind Tribes and Social Pug (a sharing plugin) as well as campaigns I’ve created. There are also campaigns here from emails that allow you to track traffic – many providers like Active Campaign and ConvertKit include this automatically.

Google URL builder

Google’s URL builder gives you a quick way to create UTM codes.  It doesn’t create a custom URL but adds the extra information to the existing destination URLs to record the extra information.

To use it, simply enter your website address.

You are required to enter the campaign source (so that you can keep track in All Traffic) The rest of the parameters are optional.

Copy and paste this link with the UTM code into your individual campaign or content. It also works for pins for Pinterest but don’t use the link shorteners here.

Making the most of UTM codes

If you’re looking to get more information about your traffic and how your marketing is working, UTM codes are the way to go. It’s a free service from Google or other software that lets you create a link with different parameters so you can track things like which social channels your customers come from. Once created, this link can be used in an email campaign, paid marketing campaigns, on Pinterest pins or even Facebook ads!

Have any ideas for where else these links could be helpful? Let us know by commenting below!