Every brand sends a newsletter, places a branded content article on an external site or uses an influencer for their product.
The results are likely to differ, and of course you want to know how effective each channel and each expression has been. The simplest way – for which you don’t need to have any tracking codes or pixel knowledge – is to use UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) codes.
A UTM code is the url of your website, but with added tags. By means of these tags, Google Analytics sees the exact origin of this link, and you can use it for further analysis.
How do you create a UTM code?
You start with a UTM builder
You can add up to five tags to a UTM code. It is important that you always add tags consistently, so that you can easily and conveniently find the results of your newsletter later on.
- Campaign Source. This is the source from which your visitor comes. For example newsletter, influencers, or branded content
- Campaign Medium. This is the medium that you use. For example email, insert known influencer or shopaholiek.com
- Campaign Name. This is where you name your campaign. This could be the name of your launch: SS19 Pink Collection. In the case of newsletter tracking, we recommend that you fill in a week number, so that you can easily find out later in which week your newsletter was sent.
- Campaign Term. This is actually only used for keyword bidding ads, and is not relevant for now. Therefore you can leave it empty.
- Campaign Content. If you implement several links in one newsletter, it may be interesting to know which piece of content from the newsletter was the trigger. You can fill that in here. For example ‘homepage’ or ‘storelocator’.
After these tags have been entered, you will see a new link, which you paste instead of the normal link in your newsletter, or give to the influencer or the editorial staff of the branded content article. Important: first test the link yourself to see if it works. Some of the website platforms block trackable url’s. Is this the case for your website? Contact your developer.
Whenever someone clicks on a link, it is trackable. How do you do this? In one of our favorite programs: Google Analytics.
Google Analytics
In Google Analytics you can find and analyze all your website data.
This program shows the number of website visitors, the time that a visitor stays on your website, the channels or campaigns from which visitors come to your website and much more. You can implement your UTM tagging as follows:
- To do this, go to Acquisition > Campaigns > All Campaigns.
- Next, you search for the Campaign name that you added to the utm code earlier, such as the week number
- Then you see the source / medium and you see how many people clicked, what the bounce rate was, how many pages were viewed on average, how long someone stayed on the website on average and how many transactions came out of your newsletter. This is all essential information to include in your analysis to compare the effectiveness of your newsletters, influencer campaigns and branded content articles.
