As a warning, there’s a lot in this post, and it builds as we go on – so depending on your experience some of it may feel like review. And to help bring this to life, we’ll also include a variety of examples. Here are some quick links if you want to jump around:
Let’s start fairly simple.
What Is Digital Tracking?
A business’ website exists to serve the business. A website is a powerful Marketing tool. It can be a powerful Sales tool. And, depending on the kind of Offer(s) you provide, your website can also drive your Fulfillment process.
If your business has a website you would be absolutely foolish to NOT have insight into what people are doing when they visit.
What pages they go to, from where, for how long, and what kinds of behaviors they take (opt-in, purchases, etc.) is objective data. That data is critical to helping you understand if your various efforts are working.
Digital tracking is how you collect this kind of website visitor data.
The de facto standard for digital tracking is Google Analytics. I use it, all my clients use it, Monkeypod uses it, and I would recommend you do too. The tool is free, built to handle more traffic than you will (likely) ever be able to amass, and lightweight so that your page load speeds are not slowed down by the data collection.
All you have to do is install a small tracking script into your website’s code.
How does Digital Tracking work?
he easiest way to think about it is to go back to kindergarten.
Remember when the teacher would pin a note to your shirt for your parents when you got home, because you were too little of a tyke to reliably share stuff? Digital tracking is like pinning a note to a link anytime you point it back to your website. You can pin up to five notes actually (see the next section).
Whether your link is in an email, from social media, in a direct mail piece, behind a QR code, behind a shortened link on a billboard…you can ALWAYS track from where your website visitors came. And IMHO you always should.
The magic is in the URLs themselves.
If you’ve ever paid attention to a link and noticed stuff like “utm_source=BP-05-2025” that’s like a little note being pinned to a link so the website operator can understand where that traffic came from.
Later, the website operator can go into Google Analytics and look for traffic that came from any sources with “BP-05-2025” and see what those specific visitors did.
How do I implement Digital Tracking?
Google Analytics allows you to “pin” up to five different utm parameters to any link so you can analyze the link’s performance:
- Source – The highest level of tracking distinction. I recommend using the publishing source for this value (e.g. Facebook, Hulu, New York Times).
- Medium – This is the next highest level of distinction and should be platform agnostic. For example, every Source above could have “ad” as the medium. You will be wise to note that when digging into Google Analytics data, you can view things by the Source/Medium pair of utm parameters. No other parameters have this kind of paired view.
- Campaign – I recommend thinking about this as the main asset itself. For example, if I had a free report with various calls-to-action on different pages, I would set the Campaign as the name of the free report.
- Term – This should reference the specific piece of the main asset where the link is actually found. Keeping with the free report example, I would set the Term as “pageX” where X is the specific page the link is found.
- Content – This should be unique for every instance of the link. Even on a single page of a free report, there might be multiple instances of the same link. For example, the header and footer of each page might have the same call-to-action. In that case, the Content could be set to “header” and “footer”, respectively.
As you can imagine, in order to get meaningful and usable data, you want to be consistent with the parameters you use between marketing efforts because you can technically use anything you want. If you have a team, you must create some kind of document or spreadsheet that tells people what utms the business is using.
Over time with consistent utm schemas, your Google Analytics will form a rich tapestry of website visitor data that you can dive into for insights.
Can you help me visualize it…
This is very heady, especially if you aren’t used to crunching data and numbers.
Think of UTM parameters as an upside-down pyramid with five levels, each narrowing down to the specific link click.
Example 1: Tracking with CRM Emails
Anytime a blog post is published, I email our list about it. Usually more than once. To track the effectiveness of those email announcements, I have used this particular utm schema for years.
If it helps to visualize with the pyramid, one blog post announcement email that links to the article via the featured image AND a text-based CTA can be thought of like this:
Example 2: A PDF With A Call-to-Action On Every Page
Imagine you have a 20 page PDF. Now, imagine the header and footer of every page has a call-to-action for people to visit a sales page on your website.
20 pages times two links per page is 40 links throughout the whole document.
If you want to Be Pro about things, you would ensure that every one of those calls-to-action is uniquely trackable via utms even though they all direct to the same destination.
The pyramid visual for the first two pages would look something like:
Example 3: Ad Campaign Tracking Swipes
Let me be as clear as I can: If you are doing any kind of Meta or Google advertising (or anywhere else for that matter), you absolutely 100% need to be using utms in an intentional way.
Anytime we run ads for ourselves or clients, we use the OAC Framework; Objective, Audience, and Creative.
In that case, the Source is always the ad platform and the Medium is always “ad”.
Then, the rest of the utms directly correlate to the OAC distinction:
- utm_campaign is the name of the advertising campaign where the Objective is set.
- utm_term is the name (or ID) of the Audience settings.
- utm_content is the name of the specific Creative people see; the raw ad itself.
Using utms in this way allows you to directly analyze your paid efforts and do win-loss analysis much easier.
Here are the tracking parameters we use for various common platforms. You can literally copy/paste these into the appropriate places in the ad platform. If you need help with these please reply and let me know!
Google Ads:
{lpurl}?campaignid={
*If you are advertising on YouTube, update the utm_source to be youtube
Bing Ads
{lpurl}?utm_source=bing&utm_
Meta Ads
utm_source=meta&utm_medium=ad&
LinkedIn Ads
utm_source=LinkedIn&utm_
So simple my Mom uses it…
My mom is a leading educator around medical simulation for nursing students. She has been teaching this stuff for well over a decade and has written a lot of articles on the topic. Every time she writes an article, she promotes it on LinkedIn because that is where she hangs out professionally online and networks with other professionals.
A few years ago, I encouraged her to start building her own list so that she would not be reliant on LinkedIn for getting the word out about new articles. The idea is simple: anytime she has a new article she publishes it and then emails her list about it to drive readership & conversation.
I helped her build a simple landing page for people to join her list, and then helped her build out a weekly chain of articles she had already published. Then after new subscribers make it through, they are all caught up and will be notified of new articles as they come out.
By now, she has nearly a full year’s worth of weekly articles. I’m super proud of her and a little jealous I haven’t done this for my own business. Classic cobbler’s kid problem #AmIRight?
Also, to Be Pro about it, I added proper Google Analytics tracking to the article links in each email.
For example: https://www.healthysimulation.
The extra utm_stuff after the “?” in the url are the tracking parameters for Google Analytics 🙂
Hold On A Sec…That Isn’t The Schema Your JUST Shared Paul…
You noticed that, huh? Well, there is a reason for that.
If you look at the link above, it is pointing to HealthySimulation.com. My mom does not own this website, she is simply a guest contributor. She will NEVER get access to that company’s Google Analytics.
That doesn’t mean she still can’t prove her own promotional efforts with this publisher. By seeding her own utm parameters, rather than leave it up to fate, whoever does their web traffic analysis will be able to see exactly how many clicks her emails specifically drove to that article.
Put another way, this means she can prove to this publisher (and others in the future) that her articles are genuinely driving web traffic with her own promotional efforts.
Since we are here, and because we love my mom, go ahead and give that article link above a little click-a-rooney-doo to give that guest post a spike in traffic which will make her look cool.
Editor’s Note:
A moment ago we linked you to Paul’s resource defining the OAC acrynoym, and how that framework helps you define the Objective, Audience, and Content. Did you click that link? If you haven’t, go ahead and click it now – if you look carefully you’ll see that I updated the URL parameters so that when Paul checks his traffic, he’ll be able to differentiate traffic sent this this page from Monkeypod from traffic generated by his other channels.
Those Links Look Crazy, Is That Hard To Make?
Nah. Google has its own UTM Builder tool that I’ve had bookmarked for probably a decade by now. I’d recommend you bookmark this now too.
Simply paste in the link you want to track, input the source/medium/etc. and then you can copy the link beneath and use it wherever you want.
In fact, the screenshot from example #1 above is the UTM builder tool.
Pinning Little Urchins To Any Link
In case you were wondering why they are called “utm” parameters, there is a fun & short history lesson here.
The Google Analytics technology was not developed by Google. A company called Urchin was the original developer of a tool for this kind of website tracking. You installed their tracking script on your website and then appended the various parameters to the links you wanted to track. Those parameters were called Urchin Tracking Modules. UTM.
Google acquired the company in 2005 and turned it into Google Analytics. They chose to keep the same utm_source/medium/etc. parameters. The rest is history.
Ok…I Can Seed The Tracking Data But How Do I Analyze It?
Another smart question.
Attaching those utms to links is great because that starts pushing the data YOU want to see inside Google Analytics. Looking at the data is a whole different kettle of fish. Mostly because there are SOOOO many ways to slice and dice the data that whole books have been written on the topic.
There is way more to cover about website traffic analysis than I would ever want to write about in a single post.
Fortunately, a few months ago on our bi-monthly Knights of Automation Mastermind, my friend Heather Wells and I spoke about this exact topic. The first part of the mastermind covers how utms work, which you’ve already learned about in this email. Starting about 15 mins into it I explain HOW to dig into the utm data.
What’d you think?
I know there was a lot here – so feel free to take your time and re-visit any sections that felt intimidating. I’m passionate about this topic because I know the difference it can make for business owners who want to take this seriously, and benefit from the insights it makes available.
Are you starting to now see how powerful digital tracking can be when done right? What questions do you have for me? Is there anything you’d like me to clarify?
No matter how big Be Pro grows, I plan to personally read and reply to all questions that come in for as long as I can. You can comment on this post, or reach out here if you have additional questions I can help with.
Want more?
If you want to learn how to lay the groundwork and install digital tracking, I did a presentation for a WordPress conference showing how to install Google Analytics and some other tracking pixels (Facebook, Google Ads) using Google’s Tag Manager. Watch it here:
Have your own questions?
If you would benefit from a place to ask automation questions when you get stuck, and get ideas and inspiration from other businesses, you can join us in the Monkeypod Membership.
