What Are UTM Links and Why Are They Vital to Email Marketing?

If you are using email marketing to increase traffic to your website, or to push your list of contacts to a particular landing page, you need to use UTM links to fully understand how effective your email marketing campaigns are.

Generating Traffic with Email Marketing

Email marketing is a great way to increase traffic to your website or to campaign landing pages.

Start with a clean mailing list. Build your list with contacts that are interested in what you have to say, not by buying lists. Your efforts will be much more effective when you have a list that has already shown interest in your brand, product and/or industry. In addition, as anti-spam and privacy laws continue to become more strict, you are better off with a compliant and qualified list. ( Learn more about CASL .)

Once you have this list, keep it nurtured by sending out regular emails with relevant content. Emails should offer enough information to provide an idea of what the content is about, with a link to a webpage or landing page that will continue the story. This increases traffic on your webpage.

What are UTM Links

A UTM link is a hyperlink that includes additional meta data (code) to provide specific information that you need to track the performance of the link within that marketing tactic or campaign. UTM stands for “Urchin Tracking Module”, and are also know as UTM parameters, or tracking tags, because they help you "track" website traffic from its origin.

A typical UTM code looks like this:

Google Analytics recognizes the additional information provided in the link and provides a few reports showing website traffic originating from these links. (See below on how to find the reports.)

How to Create UTM Links

The easiest way to create the UTM links to use Google’s Campaign URL Builder, a free online tool.

Build the details of your links based on how you want to track the source of traffic to your website, getting as granular as you can to get the best insights for improving your ongoing email marketing efforts.

Here is an example of a content block within a newsletter:

If we refer back to the example mentioned above, it is the button link that we are tracking:

This link needs to be added to the button in the newsletter, rather than the direct link which in this case would be:

How UTM Links Are Tracked in Google Analytics

To view the traffic to the website that used your UTM links, you need to log into your Google Analytics account. You will see a few different reports. Go to:

1. Create a custom report under "Customization" > "Custom Reports". Add Medium, Campaign, or Source as a dimension and the metrics you want to view.
2. Go to Acquisition -> Overview -> All Traffic -> Source/Medium to view traffic
3. Go to Acquisition -> Campaigns -> All Campaigns to view traffic based on your custom campaign names.

Monitor, Evaluate and Improve

As in any marketing campaign, you need to start with a strategy which includes defined objectives. Strengthen your Email Marketing efforts by monitoring the performance of campaigns , understanding where clicks are occurring and leveraging these insights to plan your next campaign.