Usually, understanding which of your potentially many outbound strategies is generating the most traffic for your campaign is difficult. However, with the use of HubSpot UTMs, you can track precisely down to the specific link and the specific campaign; allowing you to focus your marketing efforts on the most successful campaigns.
Understanding what UTMs are and how they are used will allow you to make the most of links within your paid advertising.
What Are HubSpot UTMs and How Are They Used?
UTM’s create tracking IDs for URL links within a piece of text, that help you to determine where a potential customer has reached your website/conversion from. They form a string at the end of a URL, with four or five different parts that form the entire module: source, medium, campaign, content, and term. The final parts are optional but can give you extra detail if needed. The string is as follows:
The aim is to know the specifics of where a lead has come from so that you have a better understanding of which parts of the ad campaign are working better than others.
What Different Parts of a UTM Mean?
Different ad campaigns may need various forms of deployment to be effective. With social media advertisements, the source allows you to see which platform has been the most effective. The most successful platform for ads has been Facebook, although, with recent laws and regulations, other platforms have risen in popularity in the marketing industry.
For other outbound marketing approaches, such as email campaigns, you can change the source to the email number (if it is within a sequence or workflow) or the list of people that you will have accumulated as viable contacts.
Similarly, the medium does exactly as the name suggests. It will tell you which of the marketing mediums the click came from. This is important as it will tell you which form of advertising is working best.
You may have various campaigns running at the same time, all with different mediums and sources. You may also be running variations of the same campaign to see whether small differences have a wider impact. By including different forms of content, you are more likely to receive clicks – as the desire for in-depth, easily consumable content is on the rise.
Sometimes you will utilize multiple links in one body of text. Although the field is optional, it is a best practice to utilize the content field of the UTM to differentiate between the various links, regardless of whether the destination URL is the same throughout. This will give you an idea of how far into the ad the contact read before visiting your site.
How to Set Up Google and HubSpot UTMs
There are two main ways that you can set up tracking URLs. HubSpot has a UTM builder on its platform. Google Analytics also offers a similar tool. However, the key difference between them is that GA allows you to shorten the output URL to hide the full string of text, which stops readers from viewing your tracking codes until they click on the link.
There are no particular benefits from using one over the other, but if you are using HubSpot to track your campaigns, it may be a good place to keep your UTMs too.
Easy Mistakes to Make & Best Practices
UTMs and tracking URLs are the key to understanding traffic throughout your campaigns. You need to ensure that, when creating your tracking metrics, you have a clear process to determine why things are named a certain way, and that there is no overlap between them. Clear differentiation will avoid confusion when analyzing your campaigns.
For this, it’s important to have a good data governance procedure within your organization, and to ensure that the naming conventions are signed off by the person that will keep track of lead behaviors – so that they know what to expect once leads start coming in. Alongside this, when creating UTMs, curate a spreadsheet of all of the different fields and the links that they are attributed to. If creating on GA, also include the reduced link in the spreadsheet.
When using a mix of GA and HubSpot to create your UTMs, the naming conventions should be the same for both, to minimize any error and to confirm that no data will be lost once the form has been completed.
Creating HubSpot workflows around your tracking URLs will help you to integrate your leads further into the HubSpot platform with their lead scoring tool. Once created you can set specific property values to track where a contact lies in their journey to becoming a customer.
Nituno is a certified HubSpot partner and our team understands the importance of UTMs within your advertising campaigns. Not only can we help you build your outbound or paid campaigns, but we can help your team to align on how to track your sales leads and how they interact with your sales team.
Our team is trained on how to manage each of the elements outlined today, and can seamlessly integrate HubSpot and UTMs to boost the efficiency of your ad campaigns. Get in touch today to find out more about how we can help.
