How to use Google UTMs to analyze your social traffic

If you've always wondered how many clicks your blog posts get on social media, this article is for you. You can attribute traffic to page posts, group posts, and ads by simply adding the Google Urchin Tracking Module (UTM) parameters to the links you share. UTMs allow you to differentiate one traffic source from another. Integrating unique links into your blog posts will help you discover more about your readers. These special links also allow you to create identifiers within URLs so you can track referrals to opt-ins, blog posts, or landing pages you direct your users to. These links not only let you track referrals from a variety of sources like your Facebook ads and email newsletters, but they also send people from various places to the same landing page URL. This is why your business's marketing team needs to get on board with this tracking interface.

Image : shutterstock

Here's a quick guide on how you can use Google UTMs to analyse your social traffic.

Include UTM parameters in the URLs you share on your social media profiles

If you share your blog posts across Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking sites and you want to find your highest ROI yielding platform and which links perform best on that particular platform, UTMs can help you analyse your social media referral traffic. For example, on Twitter you have four options to promote your links – a regular tweet, a promoted tweet, bio description, and website field. Except the profile link, you can track all of these link clicks independently. After you've generated a custom URL, you can shorten the link to save up on the characters used. Once you start gathering the data, you'll get an enriching Google Analytics report which will help you draft a plan for the future.

Utilise UTM links with Google Goals

Evaluate your campaigns and combine them with Google Goals to track traffic sources of all your content. Google Goals will take your UTM links even further by letting you track opt-ins after someone clicks on your blog post. Combining these two tools allows you to designate a path that a subscriber takes from a traffic source. Using UTM links and Google Goals together not only lets you track the ads that you have placed in your content, but also helps you understand how well those ads are doing.

Track the characteristics of the best banner advertisements for your brand

If your brand regularly has campaigns that include paid marketing, then you ought to know which banner ads perform better than the others. With UTMs, you can not only locate which external website brings maximum traffic, but you can also find out the banner placement, size, designs, and colours that are most effective. If you set up goals inside Google Analytics, you can find the most valuable piece of information that affects your business.

UTM parameters provide extremely relevant insights about your traffic. Businesses can miss out on a gold mine of their audience's behavioral data which can gradually boost sales if they don't make use of Google UTMs.