Tracking Links
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We have social. We have email. We have paid ads. There’s more sites, platforms, and networks than we could possibly hope to run our campaigns on.
How do we keep track of it all?
How do we know what’s working and what’s not?
Select your Store tab > Products > Generate A Link as shown below:
A Handy Guide to UTM Codes: Know Which of Your Campaigns Really Work
UTM stands for Urchin Tracking Parameters. They’re little pieces of data that we add to our URLs in order to see where different traffic comes from. They were introduced way back with an analytics tool called Urchin, the tool that was bought by Google and evolved into Google Analytics. Somewhere along the way, they became the industry standard for tracking marketing campaigns across tools.
These days, most analytics tools, marketing apps, marketing automation tools, and CRMs look for these parameters automatically.
Although there are more, we use three standard parameters.
UTM Source: The individual site within that channel. For example, Facebook would be one of the sources within your Social medium for any unpaid links that you post to Facebook. If you’re running a Facebook ad or spending money to promote a link, you’d want to label Facebook as a source within Paid. If you’re building a link for an email, define which list you’re sending the email to.
UTM Medium: Think of this as a channel. Social, Organic, Paid, Email, and Affiliates are all core marketing channels that include multiple traffic sources.
UTM Campaign: The specific campaign that you’re running. Feel free to fill this in however it makes sense to you. Names that allow you to easily identify product launches, promotional campaigns, individual emails or posts, etc., are all good.
Whenever you put a link on an external site (not your own site), you add these parameters to your URL. Then when traffic lands on your site, you know where the visitor came from and that data appears in all your marketing and analytics tools.
Once you have created your tracking campaign, you can now copy and paste the URL to your preferred off-site source.
Once your link starts to generate traffic, you can view all the data in the Top Sources Tab:
Note: source data can also be viewed within the users dashboard 'CRM' properties
